DISQUS

Net Neutrality debate in my work with the Hands Off the Internet coalition. The bottom line is that new net neutrality regulations are unnecessary.

There is no current or anticipated content discrimination or service degradation justifying new regulation and proponents of new regulations have failed to provide any evidence to back up their speculation of what "could" happen. Additionally, all of these calls neglect the fact that anti-trust and consumer protection laws exist should any of these hypothetical situations actually occur.

A logical approach is that recently noted by FTC Chairwoman Deborah Majoras that without evidence of “market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.”

I certainly agree with Harry in that Google is supporting net neutrality purely for some self interest and not out of T follow up on the Google issue, here is a blog entry highlighting Google's recent announcement that their 4th quarter profits had tripled from a year ago. Google is trying to create a monopoly all under the distraction of this debate.

"This is very good news for Google. It also underscores how unfair it is that Google is advocating net neutrality regulations in an attempt to gain a competititve advantage at the cost of the providers of the backbone of the internet. Google knows that net neutrality will severely impair the ability of companies, such as Verizon, to continue rolling out costly service improvements, such as FIOS."

http://nbjr.speakupwny.com/profit-for-google-ne...

I work with the Hands Off the Internet coalition on the net neutrality issue  and would echo the recent warning of a couple quite knowledgeable sources.  Recently, Carnegie Mellon Prof. and “Godfather of the Internet” David Farber and Michael Katz, Chief Economist at the FCC during the Clinton Administration put out an editorial warning about net neutrality,  "Network neutrality is supposed to promote continuing Internet innovation by restricting the ability of network owners to give certain traffic priority based on the content or application being carried or on the sender's willingness to pay. The problem is that these restrictions would prohibit practices that could increase the value of the Internet for customers." They continue, noting that there is no need for net neutrality legislation,  "Public policy should intervene where anti-competitive actions can be identified and the cure will not be worse than the disease. Policymakers must tread carefully, however, because it can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine in advance whether a particular practice promotes or harms competition. Antitrust law generally takes a case-by-case approach under which private parties or public agencies can challenge business practices and the courts require proof of harm to competition before declaring a practice illegal. This is a sound approach that has served our economy well." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...

While I agree that Senator Stevens needs a tutorial on the internet(s), I wouldn't call Senator Dorgan an expert by any stretch of the imagination. He reeled off the talking points in his YouTube video about the legislation, but likely doesn't understand all the issues involved.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I work with the Hands Off the Internet coalition in opposing net neutrality regulations. They are unnecessary and would severely restrict innovation not preserve it.

As one of the chairman of my coalition noted,

“As Democrats and Republicans recognized, these proposed neutrality regulations essentially create a legal loophole for large content companies such as Google, eBay and Amazon to avoid paying for the online bandwidth they use. These regulations are completely unwarranted and would ultimately force consumers to pay an increasing percentage of the huge cost to upgrade America’s vital communications networks."

http://handsoff.org/blog/

That is a good way to frame the "net neutrality" debate and one that isn't raised often among all the hypothetical scenarios predicitng the end of the internet without net neutrality regulations.

I can't speak to the MI bill, but I have been following the national debate in my work with the Hands Off the Internet coalition and the federal regulations would prohibit the prioritization of VOIP, video, and gaming packets over a spam email packet. We are already seeing problems with VOIP calls being dropped and poor reception due to overcrowded network and net legislation regulating the internet in the name of net neutrality certainly wouldn't resolve this problem.