Before we forget, let us happily note that Portia Krebs from USTA has just launched a blog, appropriately titled NextGenWeb.

Be sure to check out her first post introducing the site, and then another one from her colleague, Bill Deere, about testifying before a House small business committee yesterday, addressing the subject of rural broadband — an important issue we’ve talked about here before.

This is an exciting development. In the fight for the Internet’s future, we can always use another ally — especially one who brings institutional knowledge and technical expertise to the table.

You’ve heard this from us before, but Matt Sherman puts the facts about regulation and broadband capacity very eloquently:

We cannot legislate new bandwidth into existence. All we can do is to provide as free a playing field as possible, with basic protections (such as property rights and antitrust) at the outer margins. Especially in the case of the technology industry, keeping all possibilities open is the way to maximize progress and truly measure public demand. Prophylactic new laws — beyond the myriad ones we already have — can only slow this down.

The real threat to Internet equality has nothing to do with the fight groups like Save The Internet want to have. The real threat is that the United States lags far behind other developed countries in broadband speeds and many Americans living outside the cities can’t get online any faster than plain old dial-up. Those are the issues that matter, and “net neutrality” is at best a distraction.

With each passing week, it seems more and more voices are stepping into the debate about “net neutrality” — and many (perhaps even most) of them are adding new points about why net neutrality legislation would be a big mistake.

Try David Cowan, a venture capitalist and blogger, who recently posted an extremely insightful essay about the claims and realities of the proposed legislation. It’s clear and concise, but even better, it tackles the “FedEx analogy” with important detail that’s worth quoting at length:

The call for net neutrality is superficially appealing, in the same way that it’s easy to oppose free trade in defense of your countrymen’s jobs. But just like regulating imports, regulating ISPs with rules on net neutrality is short-sighted and, in the long term, terrible for both businesses and consumers. It’s politically incorrect to say so, it’s likely to get me flamed, and Google won’t like me for saying it, but it’s true.

Market forces will, as they always have, drive innovation on the internet. ISPs will find ways to accelerate and guarantee delivery with all sorts of interesting new services, and businesses who can deliver more value to their consumers through better internet performance can afford to pay for them. Should Fedex have been prohibited from competing against the Post Office, so that “big corproations” wouldn’t have an advantage over the little guy? Of course not.

Proponents of net neutrality would counter that Fedex doesn’t hurt the performance of old-fashioned mail, while express lanes for packets will necessarily slow down “free packets” pushed to the back of the line. On the contrary: allowing ISPs to profit from delivering express services for special classes of traffic will directly lead to the rapid development of additional internet capacity. There is no limit to the number of lanes one can build on the information highway, unless of course you regulate and cripple the only entities capable of building those lanes.

As we’ve long argued, net neutrality would almost certainly hinder investment in new broadband capacity, while allowing the pipe-owners to innovate will spur more innovation and investment. And Cowan has a great find in the quote he uses to lead his post. We’ll use it to end this one:

“People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.” — Max Eastman

We couldn’t have said that better ourselves.

You never know what you’re going to get, in their comment section. While reading a post about “net neutrality” at the popular geek/technology site just the other day, we came across an excellent description of QoS and explanation of how it fits into the current debate. It was written by a site regular under what we assume is a pseudonym, and we thought it was good enough to republish here in full:

I think a big issue is that the telecoms want to be able to charge more money for providing essentially a new service via the Internet: Quality of Service (QoS), which guarantees a certain bandwidth and delay (latency) between communicating parties. Up until now, the Internet has excelled at data transfer akin to FTP. In other words, whether your email delivery (or movie or software download) occurs in 5 milliseconds or 5 seconds, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. Whether the network drops some of your data, it doesn’t matter because the sender will retransmit, adding only milliseconds to the whole transfer. (As opposed to QoS, this is called “Best Effort”, as in the network makes a best effort to transfer your data, and if it fails, the sender will send again until the data reaches the destination.)

But long latency and dropped packets are VERY BAD for real-time communication such as 2-way voice conversations and live video. Providers of such service need a QoS guarantee, for example: Give me a bandwidth of 30 kilobits per second with a latency of 1 second or less for the next 10 minutes. The first part “30 kilobits per second” is peanuts given today’s broadband connections and fiber crisscrossing the nation. But the telco’s want to be able to provide the other guarantees of low latency and few dropped packets (”latency of 1 second or less for the next 10 minutes”) and charge extra for that capability. It seems legitimate as long as the “best effort” traffic is not impacted.

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves. The commenter also points out something the “net neutrality” crowd fails to acknowledge: That QoS-enabled Internet is in fact a different type of Internet service than the one most of us use every day. That costs a bit more than the regular type, sure, but why shouldn’t it? That’s just the market in action.

At ZD Net, Tom Foremski asks a very interesting question:

I would love to know how much Internet bandwidth is used by the swarms of spiderbots? Because if bandwidth costs are going to go up, as the telco/cable last mile owners charge third parties for bandwidth, then the spiderbots might get banned.

Spiderbots eat up a huge amount of bandwidth, and if bandwidth gets more expensive, the spiderbots are going to suffer. For example, I get 5 per cent of my traffic from more than 18 spiderbots. They use up about one-third of my bandwidth.

That’s a key reason why Google, Yahoo and others, are pushing for net neutrality–equal access to bandwidth–at least the last mile pipe to the home, the most important pipe. If companies are going to have to pay extra to the telcos or cable companies for bandwidth to reach their users, they might not be so pleased to be paying for the bandwidth of the spiderbots.

In other words, it’s no surprise that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — the search engine behemoths — are asking for special protection from the government. If they can avoid paying for the bandwith they use, they certainly will. And who gets stuck paying for the Internet usage of these large, wealthy companies? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a network engineer) to figure out that the ones paying for it will be the rest of us.

The Pew Research Center recently issued a fascinating multi-part report on broadband use in the United States. You can find all of the documents at their site. But we were most interested in their report about broadband access across the country. Pew demonstrates, just “24% of rural Americans have high-speed internet connections,” a double-digit difference from their urban counterparts. If you live in a city or close-in suburb, this may be news to you. But if you’re one of the millions of Americans who does live in a rural area, you’re probably all too aware.

The telecom industry has been working hard to bring high-speed Internet access to the small towns of America, but so-called Internet “neutrality” laws would shackle telecom firms, potentially drying up outside investment. In Washington DC, the Silicon Valley and other areas that already have *their* broadband Internet, some are trying to convince Congress the US needs these laws. As we have argued since the beginning, clearly, we don’t. But more than that, they would be a disaster for millions of Americans. The Senate should keep this in mind as it considers making any changes to US telecommunications laws.