About Professor Tim Wu’s recent New York Times oped, a few comments:

His essay begins, “If we aren’t careful, [the U.S. is] going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.” Really? If the past decade shows anything, it’s the stunning progress America has made in improving the availability of new and better broadband options. In short, precisely the opposite of a bandwidth cartel.

A decade ago (not adjusting for inflation), basic DSL cost $70/month in Pennsylvania, $60/month in the Rocky Mountain states, and $90/month in California. Since then, prices have plunged while online speeds and access choices have surged. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi spots are in every coffee shop and more than 15 million users have signed up for wireless broadband, which is also getting faster.

Seems like a pretty odd “cartel.”

Wu’s major focus is on what he calls the “pressing need to explore all alternative supplies of bandwidth before it is too late.” But the idea of adding bandwidth alone is a discredited (and monumentally expensive!) model for handling consumers’ Internet needs. Even the Japanese, with their sophisticated networks, have accepted the need to manage traffic data to keep up with P2P filesharing.

The real problem with Wu’s argument is that it almost completely ignores the need for across-the-board investment incentives – for unproven and proven technologies. To take one example, PBS technologist Bob Cringely recently observed that Cisco’s new Nexus 7000 router, when fully tricked-out, could support around one million concurrent users. He continued that this will “undoubtedly set a new low cost point for per-subscriber hardware” and that Cisco “is going to sell a lot of these puppies” to IPTV providers.

That’s the kind of technology coming to market and consumers will wind up the beneficiaries as quality improves and prices continue to drop.

But the key is that will only happen if the regulatory climate remains conducive to investment, network management and new deployment. Judging by Prof. Wu’s previous embrace of Net neutrality and his selective silence on network management and new investment, this is a reality he should consider.

More wisdom on the Net neutrality front courtesy of our co-chair Christopher Wolf on this recent interview on WebMasterRadio.FM:

We don’t make laws just for the sake of making laws. We make laws where they can actually achieve a worthwhile purpose and where there is a need.

The adverse unintended consequences of [Net neutrality] regulation – the cost of complying with those regulations, of fighting over what they mean – eventually will mean that consumers will have to bear the costs both of the disputes but also of the build-out….

So instead of broadband getting cheaper, it’s quite possible that it will get more expensive.

Courtesy of today’s New York Times, here’s another benefit of the dedicated network link: a cleaner, greener world. As Steve Lohr at The Times writes:

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies. [emphasis ours]

To give just one example, Accenture used videoconferencing to avoid 360 airline trips (240 of them international) in May alone.

From a technical perspective, the dedicated links mean seamless video communication without interruption from spam, DoS attacks or other problems from the online Dark Side. An added benefit: Customers of these services are financing the build-out of tomorrow’s networks.

In short, this is precisely the kind of “win-win” development we should expect from a marketplace that’s left free to innovate. Hopefully our friends on the other side would agree.

A tip of the hat to AP’s Anick Jesdanun for this article on maintaining the Net’s traditional openness:

Say it on the Internet, and you’ll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that’s controversial but otherwise legal.

Jesdanun’s article shows how Net neutrality agitators Google and eBay themselves dabble with online gatekeeping when it suits their purposes. But in fairness, it also explores the difficulty of how, “balancing [competing public] interests raises very tough issues,” as Google explains it.

For our part, we hope coverage like this reminds our friends in Mountain View and San Jose that their own actions are starting to undercut the “black-and-white” rhetoric they use in describing Net neutrality.

That said, one point unfortunately missing from the article is mention of the consumer protection guarantees already set forth by the FCC – especially consumers’ ability to access the lawful Internet content of their choice. This is a principle all Internet players, whether content companies or broadband carriers, should try to see upheld.

So long as that happens – and there’s no evidence that the overall momentum is slowing – Net users will have the increasing benefits of broadband without the costly drawbacks of Net neutrality.

Initially, network neutrality was the demand that network carriers ignore the Internet’s fundamental inequality ….

[Google’s nationwide chain of computer complexes] exploit a flaw in Internet architecture that enables them to seize more than their fair share of network bandwidth, effectively giving their owner a fast lane…. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality.

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Richard Bennett unmasks the real issue spurring Google’s campaign for Net neutrality. (Hint: It’s not the well-being of Net users.)