Continuing its campaignagainst the FCC’s planned net neutrality regulation, the Washington Post launched its new Post Tech blog Thursday with an interviewwith Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and net-neutrality skeptic, David Farber. According to Farber:
[I]t’s very hard to define ["neutrality" and "reasonable network management"]. The problem here is everyone talks about reasonable network management, but if you look at it from a technical perspective, someone trying to build new ways of operating networks is going to sit there saying, “I wonder if this new brilliant idea is reasonable or not. And if I go through all the energy of implementing it and testing it, will someone in Washington say that that violates some reasonable network management criteria?”
[snip]
It is also attacking a problem which doesn’t seem to exist. The one or two cases where things that I would say fall into network neutrality have been taken care of easily. The FCC looked at this and said “You aren’t doing things right, so let’s look at it.” Having a whole set of regulations for something you don’t understand hasn’t happened is sort of tricky.
Fair enough as far as it goes. But as a practical legal and political matter we’re way past the point of debating whether we should or shouldn’t have net neutrality regulation. The question on the table in Washington is who’s going to write the rules: Congress, the FCC or the courts? The issue for the ISPs is to pick their poison, because the status quo is not an option.
For starters, you have Comcast’s litigation against the FCC over the agency’s reliance on its informal Broadband Policy Statementto order Comcast last year not to throttle BitTorrent traffic over its network. At this point, Comcast should probably consider dropping the case because there’s no plausible outcome that could benefit the ISP. Should the DC Circuit Court rule that the FCC’s “principles” have no legal force, or that the agency overstepped its jurisdiction — technically a “win” for Comcast in a narrow legal sense – the key committee chairs on the Hill would almost certainly move quickly to give the FCC to “correct” the jurisdictional problem. The FCC, meanwhile, would simply have more incentive to conduct a formal rulemaking so it wouldn’t have to rely on legally dubious policy principles. Read more »
While the article, written by Randall Stross, professor of business at San Jose State University, is never explicit as to what it means to be “Napsterized,” it’s pretty clear it is referring to the loss of legitimate e-book sales–and perhaps even hardcover sales–due to people downloading for free illicit electronic editions of books rather than paying for the licensed product–much as the recorded music industry has suffered a sharp decline in CD sales since the advent of Napster and other peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.
One person who was scheduled to be there but wasn’t was Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBC Universal. Cotton’s office sent word on Monday that he would likely have to cancel his planned trip to DC this week because, “something had come up,” back in NY so he wouldn’t be able to make the panel. They didn’t say what the “something” was but when the first reports of talks between GE and Comcast over a deal involving NBC broke Wednesday night two and two seemed to come together neatly to equal four (for the record, his office cautioned against putting two and two together).
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