Following the FCC gathering in Cambridge on Monday to conduct a hearing on network management practices, we wanted to share a great piece that ran in the Boston Globe late last year. Elaine Kamarck of Harvard University made some very important points that are worth remembering.

If you did any of those things, you are part of the new world of the Internet, a world where video is rapidly becoming the most popular thing we do online. But video takes up a lot of space, a lot more than text, and the increased use of video means that the Internet is fast filling up. The result is that if we don’t invest soon, we could be seeing, in the near future, the Internet equivalent of an early evening traffic jam on Interstate 93. It could take forever for your photos or video to download or for your e-mail to arrive.

The backbone of the Internet will need to grow. For instance, more fiber optic cable will need to be laid, and that’s not cheap. In the past the big telephone companies have laid necessary cable, and they are the ones best situated to do it again…….

It will be difficult to get phone companies to charge the prices necessary to pay for new investments in Internet infrastructure. No one can make them do so, for the Internet is not regulated. But industry will need to take into account the public interest.

We need to start thinking about a variety of options. Perhaps we should look at different pricing structures for different online activities or require the use of “smart” networks that give lower priority to entertainment-related data than to packets of data in areas like telemedicine. Many Internet activities are in the broad public interest. We need to make sure those aren’t hampered because, somewhere in the world, teenagers are playing online games or grandmas are staring at their children’s babies.

Making the final turn, we present the penultimate Deadly Sin of Net Neutrality (and we just won a $5 bet that we couldn’t use the word penultimate in this post):

“Net neutrality bans new technology, like smart networks, that could help handle the exponentially increasing amount of traffic on the Internet.”

Why do we need “smart” networks instead of “dumb” pipes? Won’t simply increasing the amount of available bandwidth solve the congestion problems? According to our co-chair, Mike McCurry, not at all:

“For the Broadband Future, we don’t just need more broadband capacity. By itself, capacity will never create a user-friendly Internet.”

Much like constructing new runways at an airport without an air traffic controller would do little to remedy delayed flights, increasing bandwidth without allowing for the technology to differentiate and direct data will do little to manage the exponentially increasing amount of information flowing across the Internet.

Bob Cringely is kind of a controversial tech columnist — he loves making big predictions, and tech bloggers love pointing out which ones he gets spectacularly wrong. But he also gets a lot spectacularly right. His last two columns have been absolute must-reads in the tech blogosphere, and both have to do with Google’s plan for world domination. Well, not quite — but close.

All that notwithstanding, something else from his first column on the subject caught our eye:

It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY — a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs.

Of Cringely’s many predictions, this one is surely one of the least far-fetched. He is right — as demand for online video increases, demands on the existing broadband infrastructure will exceed its capacity. Now, under the Dorgan-Snowe “net neutrality” bill, ISPs would not be allowed to offer the Interenet equivalent of HOV lanes. What would that mean to the average user? A slower Internet for everybody, with packets backed up from here to the interstate.

But in his next column, Cringely explained that different portions of the Internet can be used for different things:

The trick here is to see the difference between dark fiber, lighted fiber, and Internet fiber. The most expensive of these is Internet fiber — fiber connected directly to the [backbone of the] Internet and for which ISPs are paying premium prices. What those ISPs need to make P2P work better, however, isn’t fiber connected to the Internet but fiber that’s connected to other ISPs but NOT to the Internet.

From an ISP’s perspective, P2P is annoying in any case but becomes REALLY annoying when peers have to find each other by reaching out over the public Internet. If somehow that copy of American Idol could be found by polling only local nodes, then the cost of P2P would be much lower for ISPs. In fact, it would be almost nothing. The trick, then, is to expand the number of local peers to increase the likelihood that all the bits can be found on the local net.

Cringely is describing something like Akamai, a company that makes content available faster on the Internet, and which could be threatened by Dorgan-Snowe.

But he is also describing something that the Dorgan-Snowe backers claim to fear: a tiered Internet. Why would a tiered Internet be bad? They never really say. But here Bob Cringely is describing a separate network tier that runs faster than the main Internet backbone, and guess what? It would have a direct, noticeable and favorable impact on consumers.

Kudos to the Rocky Mountain News for this great editorial highlighting the inevitable result from misguided Internet neutrality regulation:

What’s changing [on the Internet] is that bandwidth-sucking content is going online faster than the Qwests and Comcasts can build the room to handle it. It’s as if Hummer owners thought they were entitled to squeeze their behemoths onto traffic lanes that were designed to handle Mini Coopers.

The telcos and cable companies want the Hummer drivers to pay extra and widen the lanes…. But Washington should not spike the concept by mandating net neutrality - or cyberspace is likely to get a lot more congested for no good reason, and with the gridlock only worsening over time.

A few years back, the Net’s intelligentsia spoke of a “bandwidth glut.” No more. Surging data traffic has eaten up available bandwidth, producing bottlenecks that can ruin an online experience.

As The News notes, neutrality regulation will only make things worse for the Net user. And that’s no snow job.