Net Neutrality Debate Less Divisive Than Last Year
Federal policymakers are discussing net neutrality in quiet tones and without rhetoric, abandoning the invective prominent when Congress was considering a major telecom bill, Rep. Boucher (D-Va.) told reporters at the Wed. State of the Net conference. Signaling shifts in his own thinking, Boucher said he’s concerned about protecting innovation -- a concern to be balanced against the need to protect startup companies’ ability to have access to “fast lane” services, he said.
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“These may be competing concerns,” but until the issue is resolved, Congress can’t move forward on broadband, Boucher said. He asked for input from experts at the event, noting the limits placed on 2006’s congressional debate by a tight time frame. The House bill didn’t address net neutrality, but the Senate took it up, prompting a firestorm that landed the bill in the dump. This Congress, net neutrality advocates will muster support for a stand-alone bill to come before the Telecom Subcommittee in the spring after hearings, Boucher said.
New ideas could spark new thinking when Congress begins hearings, Boucher said. Microsoft and FCC Chmn. Martin have offered new ideas, he said without elaborating. Much of the debate focuses on the last mile between network providers and users, said Christopher Yoo, prof. at Vanderbilt U, speaking on a net neutrality panel at the conference. Yoo advocates giving the Internet “room to experiment,” noting that many new applications bypass the traditional backbone.
Some of the net neutrality debate centers on blocking -- which raises questions about network providers’ power to block and who makes the final decisions. In some cases, blocking is desirable, such as with spam, said David Farber with Carnegie Mellon U. “You need to be able to do some form of blocking.” But the difficulty comes with who decides what is “good” or “bad,” panelists said. Timothy Wu, prof. at Columbia U. Law School, said on a summer visit to China he saw how that govt. makes decisions. Not only was it difficult to determine what sites were blocked, it was hard to find out why, he said. The solution is for operators to give full disclosure to consumers, Wu said, an assertion others seemed to share. “Every time you trust a centralized authority to make a decision, it comes at a cost,” Wu said: “How do you decide what is good and what is bad? Discrimination comes at a cost.”
Separately, Boucher said the FCC franchising order could face a legal challenge since by tradition the D.C. Appeals Court has kept the Commission on a “short leash.” Since the order -- which hasn’t been published -- hasn’t been tested legally, many companies may not be willing to risk capital on it, which could slow competition. “I do have some concerns” about whether there was proper statutory authority, he said. Nonetheless, “we need to facilitate phone company entry into multichannel video, and I'm sure that Martin thought carefully about it.”