The Internet marches on.

This week, Akamai announced a new IP acceleration service to optimize applications not accessed via a web browser. (Think Oracle.) The service works at the TCP/IP level using an end-to-end system involving Akamai routers installed outside a customer’s firewall. Granted, this is probably more important to enterprise users than ordinary net users, but as with most Internet developments, what starts as a business benefit quickly spreads once the technology becomes more affordable.

Proving that good things come in pairs, just prior to Akamai’s announcement, Level 3 announced that it was lowering prices for content delivery to approximately the market price for high-speed IP transport. That price drop all but eliminated Level 3’s premium for caching and downloading online content. The company also reaffirmed that a new streaming service will be ready by mid-November to compete against Akamai.

Three comments:

First, these announcements are timely reminders that that networks already have QoS standards that ease congestion and improve users’ experience. That may shock the sensibilities of the “all data is equal” crowd but the proof is in the results.

Second, prices are dropping and competing services are emerging – with government regulators are nowhere to be seen.

Third, given the spiraling complexity in the Net’s technology, we wonder if net neutrality partisans can still keep a straight face when they call federal oversight “a tailored, minimally-intrusive net neutrality requirement.”

Remember a long, long time ago when no major network streamed programs over the net? That was last year.

Now they all do, which is why the Wall Street Journal story that CBS is about to announce a flurry of deals to put shows online seems almost anticlimactic. If you can’t get enough of CSI or Katie, then rejoice. But the fact that once-blockbuster deals like this are now commonplace shows how dramatically networks have migrated to the web since only last year.

But it’s also a timely reminder of how these deals are placing unprecedented strain on the web’s capacity. Internet traffic growth surged past capacity growth last year. Average traffic was up 75 percent while capacity grew only 47 percent, according to the folks at TeleGeography.

Any way you look at it, the web’s capacity has to ramp up and that’s expensive. Now you know why Google and eBay are trying to so hard to avoid paying their share of these costs by lobbying for neutrality regulations. And it’s worth repeating: If they don’t, guess who will?

We were surprised to see TechDirt’s over-the-top reaction to one of our posts this week, “Hands Off the Wireless Spectrum.” If our characterization of their position as “reluctant” was wrong, we apologize. But we have nothing to apologize for in terms of our legitimate and substantive role in this important public policy debate.

Our focus is on the nation’s broadband needs and on the facts. Facts are neither honest nor dishonest — they are the facts — and people can reach their own conclusions over what the facts mean in terms of whether we need new laws on net neutrality. We happen to think we don’t need new laws, because the facts we have been pointing out for some time are these:

• There is no problem to solve. Nobody has shown that there have been any meaningful breaches of basic neutrality on the web. Pro-regulation activists have tried to make case studies out of AOL, Cox and a Canadian telecom firm, and none of those bore out. (This may have something to do with why you never hear about those situations anymore). Broadband providers are committed to a robust, uncensored Internet and also aware of the consumer outcry if they provide anything less.

• Nobody has effectively argued that current laws are insufficient to deal with any possible market abuses that could potentially arise in the future.

• More fathers of the Internet, including Dave Farber and Robert Kahn, have come forward to express their reservations about imposing net neutrality laws than have come forward to support such laws. That is because regulation has the real potential of adverse unintended consequences.

• It is probable and even likely that in the not-too-distant-future, worldwide demand for broadband will exceed existing capacity. A massive new build-out to handle that capacity is needed, and net neutrality would effectively require broadband providers to pass the cost of that build-out on to consumers exclusively.

• The Internet has never been “neutral” in the way that net neutrality activists claim. There is no utopia to return to; the Net has always been a mishmash of “best effort delivery” networks and loose agreements. Having smart networks, which net neutrality regulation would prohibit, will help to rationalize and improve the existing situation.

• In Canada, where a similar debate is occurring, their CTC bureaucracy is so mired in red tape they can’t even remove online death threats against human rights attorney Richard Warman.

• Dorgan-Snowe’s first effect would be to freeze the broadband marketplace exactly where it is, disallowing not just theoretical abuses but new innovations, too.

• The United States ranks 16th worldwide in access to broadband Internet.

• Hands Off the Internet has always endorsed the four principles of net neutrality: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.” We even took out a print ad last year to say so.

TechDirt, maybe we’re not so different. If we agree that the basic ideas of net neutrality are inoffensive but mandating them into law could be a disastrous move, then there’s more to agree on than disagree

We don’t know very much about the blog Alonline except that it is probably written by a guy named Al, and that Al definitely works in the telecom field. One other thing we know is that he makes a great case about why “net neutrality” legislation would be a bad deal for consumers:

Working in a telecommunication company I can understand the immense investment that is required to get a measurable increase in Internet speed for customers. Just working on a very local level can involve digging up roads, buying land for equipment to stand on, and a lot of very expensive equipment. When you come to the connection to the backbone then you are looking at considerably more expense as you head into units that have figures like 256Gbps in their description. And when you see what these units need to do then you realise why they cost so much. However the cost of the units is nothing compared to ensuring that the fibre optic network they connect to has the capability to carry the volume of data required - quality fibre optic cable is not cheap at all. So if a telecommunication company cannot realise any major revenue from upgrading these expensive items what do you think it’s going to do? Spend and be damned, or wait until it has to spend and then spend as little as possible? As you can see, offering the telecommunication companies an opportunity to charge the service provider companies that use the most bandwidth might be the only way that the Internet can get a chance to expand to have any redundancy and spare capacity. So it might, actually be worth voting against Net Neutrality from now on - at least if you hope to get speeds above a couple of Mbps.

If you’re reading this now and you’re in the position of voting on net neutrality, two things: 1) Hello, Senator or Representative! It’s good to have you here. 2) Alonline has a point.

Here at Hands Off the Internet, we’ve tried to avoid focusing too much on any one specific advocate of net neutrality. But let’s turn from the political activists toward the leading corporate net neutrality backer, Google. As Bennett points out, in late November 2006 Google quietly applied for a QoS patent, which reads in part:

The present invention provides efficient and effective quality of service for information that is time sensitive (e.g., real time data)…In one embodiment of the present invention time sensitive information is cut through routed on a virtual channel and pre-empts non time sensitive information. In one embodiment a communication path probe is cut through routed via intermediate network devices to establish a communication path before other information is communicated from a originating source to a final destination…

Wait. Just. A second. Google wants to do QoS now? This patent sounds like the work of a Hands Off the Internet blogger, not the chief antagonist to the development of the next generation Internet. But maybe this comes as no surprise. While the activists are invested in the matter for political reasons, Google knows where their bread is buttered. And QoS just makes sense. Matt Sherman elaborates:

Google has no interest in neutrality of any sort, be it on the content level or the physical network. By cynically backing net neutrality regulation, they hope to subdue potential competitors through force of government. At the same time, they work to build advantages that are theirs alone.

As Sherman says, they have every right to pursue their economic benefit. But they should not expect to get away with telling the public (and their political supporters) one thing while they busily go about doing the opposite.

Interesting catch from Patrick Ross at the Progress & Freedom Foundation — a RAND Europe team wrote a footnote in a 174-page study of telecommunications and business:

The interviewees in this project have indicated that Quality of Service on the Internet is a complex issue and that net neutrality needs greater analysis in order to ascertain the real investment options that can drive content and network investment in Web 2.0 and next-generation network futures.

QoS is central to the net neutrality debate, though the would-be Internet regulators never seem to get around to discussing it. That might be because if you think about the issue in terms of new services for consumers, their “let’s save the Internet by handing it over to the government” arguments don’t sound very good.

Here’s hoping RAND picks up the issue sooner rather than later.

After the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, it seems that Meredith and McDreamy might be getting back together. But, as blogged by Shonda Rhimes (the show’s writer and creator), nothing is as easy on that show as it seems: “Just remember that nothing is ever wrapped up easily on this show.”

So, what if Addison were to return to New York, but responds to an urgent call from Seattle Grace to consult on a complicated surgery that just happens to be her specialty? But there’s a terrible blizzard in New York and she can’t fly to Seattle, so she assists via Internet? Great - thanks for pitching in, Addison! Or not. Consider, in a world with government-regulated Internet traffic, when the patient on the table is crashing and Addison needs to tell Bailey what to clamp or suture, the (Internet) tubes get clogged — with email. Flatline. Intubate. (Hands Off doesn’t actually know many medical terms.this is just for color.)

This scenario occurs to us not just because we’re excited about the return of Grey’s Anatomy to ABC’s primetime schedule, but because of a recent op-ed in the Martinsburg Journal that brought up one of the more serious, albeit underexplored, reasons to oppose new net neutrality laws: The needs of telemedicine. In the op-ed, health care writer Vanessa McLaughlin explains:

“Net neutrality advocates say every bit of Internet traffic should be treated alike. But that makes as much sense as an emergency room that eliminates triage and treats a broken nose with the same urgency as a heart attack. In an ER, some cases are more critical. On the Internet, some bits of data are more important. Medical data needs to get where it’s going fast and safe. If an e-mail or music video is delayed by a traffic jam on the network, the damage is minimal. If a medical transmission is disrupted, someone could die.”

That would surely make for an interesting episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s not something we would ever want anyone to deal with. And it’s just one more reason to oppose far-reaching new Internet regulations.