good, bad and ugly

It looks like I'm on a one-post-per-month pace. Gonna have to pick it up a bit.

I've been going back and forth on net neutrality. As it stands right now, common carriage does not apply for Internet connectivity. Carriers are free to engage in price discrimination: they can charge customers different rates for the same service.

That's pretty jarring. It wouldn't be right for a shipping company to charge one rate to one customer and another rate to another customer to carry the same container. But that is less clear if one of the customers is offering a service that competes directly with the shipping company. If the shipping company offers to pack the goods at the point of origin, wouldn't it be reasonable to charge the customer that uses the packing service a lower rate for the long haul shipment? The second customer might be competing for that very business, packing the first customer's goods and delivering them to the dock.

In telecom, there are a lot of good reasons why I'd want common carriage to apply. For starters, cable and phone companies use rights of way for their fiber routes and spectrum for their wireless services that are regulated for the public good. It's reasonable to expect the carriers to submit to some regulation of their rates and services. Offering service to most of the population is part of the deal, to give one example. Common carriage is basically part of the deal, too, for "communications services" like old-fashioned telephone service. But the FCC has ruled that the Internet is an "information service" not subject to common carriage.

This galls when I think that my very low cost Skype and Yahoo! services could go away, or my free Blogger account. I've paid for my bandwidth, now give it to me! The public statements made by the big carriers appear to be off the mark at best, misleading and disingenuous at worst. Statements about future costs appear to be mere scare tactics, because carriers will always be free to charge more for more usage, just like they used to for telephone usage. If the cost of future services runs to hundreds of dollars a month, consumers will decide whether to pay for them or to stick with their "old-fashioned" HDTV cable service and telephone service.

Something else is galling, too: a limited rollout of very high speed services to homes and businesses. I want my future very high speed Internet. I want fiber to my home and office, I want ultra-fast broadband wireless, and I want my future news, entertainment, and communications to be high-def and on demand. If the way to get that is to deregulate carriers, then so be it.

Without net neutrality, carriers have more incentive to build out their networks. That is good. But the carriers will be in a position to play kingmaker between application providers. That is bad. We could wind up with a balkanized Internet, and the applications available to me over the carriers that serve my house could be different than the applications available to you at your house. That would be ugly.