I fight authority, Authority always wins

I been doing it since I was a young kid

I come out grinnin’

I fight authority, Authority always wins

– John Cougar Mellencamp, “Authority Song”

Our friend and strong Net neutrality proponent Harold Feld is out with this ringing endorsement of the FCC’s existing legal authority to protect consumers’ online rights. Good for him, though we’d add that we’ve been making much the same “existing protections” argument for two years. (See here, here and especially here.)

Still, for two reasons, the more attention on this issue, the better. First, it totally undercuts the hypothetical horror stories that some Net neutrality advocates have pushed to justify a new law. Remember the refrain about Net users finding their favorite website deliberately degraded? By Feld’s own analysis, if such a thing happened, regulators and the courts already have the tools necessary to put a quick stop to it.

Second, once there’s agreement that Net users already are protected by enforceable federal rules, the whole rationale for new rules explodes. That’s when the Net neutrality debate shifts to the real issue – pushing deployment costs away from large content companies and onto consumers.

So whether you choose to believe us or Harold Feld or the FCC Chairman, the fact remains that Net users have and will continue to enjoy an open Web for years to come.

Pike & Fisher’s annual broadband summit just concluded and you can click here for the Hands Off white paper, “Net Neutrality Regulation Will Hinder Broadband Deployment.” An excerpt:

“The Internet is at the beginning of a remarkable transformation: the long-awaited convergence of television, video, and the Net. Two years ago, not a single major television network offered viewers the chance to stream programming over the Net. Today they all do. In early 2005, YouTube didn’t exist. Today, YouTube sends a staggering 1,000 gigabytes of data every second, or nearly 300 billion GBs each month.

“Given the obvious need for huge new investment to keep up the amount of data being pushed onto the network, the inevitable question must be raised: Who will pay for all these improvements?

We’re at the summit now. More’s coming.

Jonathan Zittrain is the leading Internet professor in the world. A founder of the Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet & Society, he currently is Oxford University’s Internet guru. He has a new, widely-heralded book: “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” No doubt, net neutrality advocates were banking on Professor Zittrain to make their cause the centerpiece of his 338 page book with a title like that. But, alas, net neutrality is mentioned only briefly, in passing, deep into the book. And Zittrain hardly is an advocate for the regulation sought by net neutrality fans.

The main focus of the book is that viruses, spyware and privacy invasions by search engines will result in consumers using more secure internet appliances like the iPhone, BlackBerry and Xbox, rather than programmable PCs. Zittrain is concerned that such appliances will limit Internet innovation and the Internet experience.

As for net neutrality, Zittrain concludes: “One answer, then, to the question of net neutrality is that wide-open competition is good and can help address the primary worries of network neutrality proponents. In the absence of broad competition, some intervention could be helpful, but in a world of open PCs some users can more or less help themselves, routing around some blockages that seek to prevent them from doing what they want to do online.”

So, Zittrain hardy picks up the cudgel of net neutrality, and in fact makes the arguments against legislation and regulation by citing competition and technology as the solution should there actually be a problem (which there isn’t).

“Consumer advocates and Web heavyweights like Google Inc. and Amazon Inc. [say that] it’s a bedrock principle of the Internet that all traffic be treated equally.” — Associated Press, October 19, 2007

Oh really?

The Net neutrality implication of yesterday’s announcement is clear: Technology increasingly has the potential to take effective, real-time action against websites that peddle child porn. So far, so good and those on both sides of the Net neutrality issue almost certainly support this.

But as the article notes:

“While officials from the attorney general’s office said they hoped to make it extremely difficult to find or disseminate the [child porn] online, they acknowledged that they could not eliminate access entirely.”

That’s why emerging network technologies, in addition to improving the Web’s overall functionality, are so critical to this effort. Both the technology and the ability to make real-time decisions that keep up with the child porn dealers’ own rapid changes are vital to this effort.

But Net neutrality threatens this, especially the deployment of better networking technologies.

It would be beyond tragic if efforts to combat this serious problem were hampered because of Net neutrality regulations designed to combat a hypothetical problem.