Last Friday (June 15th) was the final day for the FCC’s public comment period on the issue of net neutrality.
The issue should be a familiar one to anyone even remotely involved in telecommunications by this point, but long story short (in the interest of being complete), the FCC was seeking public comment on whether it should regulate bandwidth pricing. The issue shakes out, roughly, content companies in favor of regulation and telcos against it.
For anyone unfamiliar with the issue, there’s more than a little bit of information available on, unsurprisingly, the net - including a pretty exhaustive Wikipedia entry.
Of course, that kind of request for public comment can sometimes double as an initiation for corporate grandstanding. And certainly, many of the companies subject to the outcome of the FCC’s decision in this regard have spent parts of the last several years on their respective soapboxes. And not all of them strictly interested in the financial impact on their own business. Some of the folks with a passionate interest in this debate are legitimately loyal to their principles, or interested in the integrity of the Internet. It has been a captivating argument.
On Friday, right under the wire, we received some comment in the form of a press release from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group “dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government,” outlining that group’s acceptably predictable stance on net neutrality.
According to Wayne Crews, VP and director of technology policy at CEI:
“Cable and DSL speeds are a trickle compared to the Niagara needed tomorrow, before even addressing the security and delivery requirements vastly beyond today’s capabilities. Freezing today’s Internet into a regulated public utility via net neutrality’s price-and-entry regulation would obviously slow investment and innovation - meaning fewer new companies, networking deals, products and technologies - but will ultimately hurt content companies too.”
There is a PDF of the organization’s complete (16-page) comment here.
Personally, I find this particular argument interesting mostly because there isn’t (from my perspective) a cut-and-dry right and wrong. As is most often the case with divisive issues involving business and regulation, both sides are pretty understandably motivated by finance, but are arguing in terms related to what’s “best” for the Internet. And there are compelling, if not altogether sincere, arguments on both sides.
Mark Sullivan of PC World offered some very salient commentary in a blog entry posted Friday. He says the comment period, and indeed the FCC’s deliberation, falls a little short of relevant to the debate. The likelihood of the FCC passing any regulations that go against the telco lobby is slim. For one thing, the FCC’s purpose is to carry out the mandate of congress. And net neutrality matters were largely the reason why congress’s most recent effort to revise the 1996 Telecommunications Act was killed.
