Pike & Fischer sponsors a Broadband Summit every year and the one held last week billed yet another shoot-out on net neutrality with me representing Hands Off, along with Gigi Sohn from Public Knowledge, Amazon’s Paul Misener and AT&T’s Jim Cicconi. You can imagine the dread of walking into the room expecting the same kind of verbal mud-wrestling that has characterized some show-downs on this subject.

Now the good news: For more than an hour Friday morning, the four of us went at it on the policy and consumer implications of net neutrality, but not once did things dissolve into The Jerry Springer Show. I think the more responsible tone shows how the net neutrality debate has matured. There still isn’t any instance of a broadband provider blocking or degrading online content. Broadband speeds are increasing. Consumers continue to sign up. But the passion of those who favor regulation to keep the Internet open and accessible thrives and that passion is genuine.

The tone of this debate was serious and purposeful and though there were plenty of disagreements at the end of the day, many of those attending came away with some sense that there may be a way to solve the net neutrality question and move on to the bigger question at hand: how we can develop a national broadband strategy that promotes access, ensures competition, and accelerates the innovations we all want the Internet to bring to American homes and businesses.

– Mike McCurry

Moving right along in our series, we present the next Deadly Sin of Net Neutrality:

Net neutrality sets America back in the goal to have every American connected to broadband by dramatically increasing the price of broadband across the board and hits those who can least afford it the hardest.

According to our good friends at Pew Research (okay, we don’t really know them, but we think they do good work), between 2005 and 2006, the high-speed adoption rate among African-Americans increased 120 percent and overall home broadband adoption increased 40 percent. Why did this occur, you may ask? And what do those numbers have to do with net neutrality? Well, according to Hands Off the Internet Co-chair Mike McCurry,

[C]ompetition forced companies to deploy services faster and make the cost more competitive. Net neutrality threatens this positive change. As competition is driving broadband prices down and adoption up, net neutrality promises to fundamentally change the way the Net is financed. This potentially shuts off our current progress and jeopardizes access for millions of families – particularly the poor and rural – who have just begun to share in America’s broadband promise.

You have to love those supporters of net neutrality – never looking out for the little guy.

How neutral is the Internet right now? As we’ve pointed out on more than one occasion, the answer is: Not very. The Internet is a network of networks and technology tools at the input end of networks can result in a content owner getting priority over others on the Internet. It’s an expensive network of networks at that, funded by private investors and public agencies and requiring yet more investment for upkeep. In short, access may be equal, but the pipes aren’t. Illustrating the point last week, Nick Carr from the IT blog Rough Type, wrote a let’s-be-honest-with-ourselves post directed primarily at supporters of net neutrality:

Net neutrality exists in the abstract, in the realm of protocol. Because the content of any packet of data is invisible to the pipe carrying it, by protocological fiat, every packet is treated the same. If that was all there was to it - if theory and reality were one - then pro-neutrality would mean pro-competition. But it’s not all there is to it. In addition to the abstract realm of protocol, there’s the very real - very physical - realm of infrastructure. Regardless of protocol, superior infrastructure provides superior quality of service - ie, faster, more reliable transmission of data. … If net neutrality becomes law, it would prevent big companies from locking in an advantage at the protocological level - giving certain types of data privileged status - but it would allow big companies to lock in an advantage at the infrastructural level.

His chief examples are not new, either. Akamai is a company that operates servers around the world so the big companies that can afford their services can get their content delivered faster than the smaller companies that can’t afford this. When you consider that one of the main arguments in favor of net neutrality is to keep big companies from overpowering little companies, it’s clear that big companies already have this advantage. And yet new web companies succeed every day.

We’ve talked off and on about the probability that Internet video could lead to a disastrous bandwidth crunch. And we’re not the only ones. Voice over IP requires reliable packet delivery, and the About VoIP blog recently touched on this issue:

The whole net neutrality debate was sparked, from what I interpret, when Internet providers felt they had to apply a tiered price structure for connections based on expected usage. Fact is, if we suddenly had the billion or so current Internet users all using VoIP and/or IPTV simultaneously, the current infrastructure couldn’t handle it. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

Nope, that’s a pretty good estimate — and a lot better than the politically-charged interpretations coming from pro-”neutrality” activists.

We all probably want faster connection speeds, and they’re coming, but will take time to roll out. What could come sooner is a new set of video compression codecs … coupled with high-power graphics cards sporting their very own quad cores or more. If our graphics cards were powerful enough, and we used super-crunched video formats, we might possibly reduce bandwidth requirements down to a point where every Internet user could potentially watch Internet TV simultaneously.

Interesting. Hey, sounds great to us. But as good as quad core is, we should still be building out our broadband infrastructure, especially in fiber-to-the-home. No reason we can’t have both.

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

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.

Barack Obama’s presidential announcement is big news and deservedly so, but there was one part of his speech on Saturday that caught our attention here in telecom policy-land. Via Slashdot, here’s the part that made us tech geeks most excited:

Let’s invest in scientific research, and let’s lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America. We can do that.

We couldn’t agree more. One of the most important challenges facing the future of the Internet is making sure that *every* home in America has access to broadband technology — in urban areas and rural areas, and, as Obama himself might say, in the red states and the blue states.

Moreover, we need to build out broadband to deal with the increased demands that applications such as HD Movies, streaming video and whatever else web 3.0 applications will bring.

However, we respectfully believe that the Senator’s support for equal access to the Internet is undercut by his previously-stated support for the vague principle of “network neutrality.” Sen. Obama’s name is attached to a bill, Dorgan-Snowe, that many telecom experts argue would reduce incentives for cable and telephone companies to make those investments.

In politics and policy, ideas and ideals often run up against each other, and sometimes virtues can conflict. While we disagree that “net neutrality” is necessarily such a virtue, we wholeheartedly concur on the import of laying broadband lines throughout America. It’s a conversation we would like to continue, and we hope as Sen. Obama starts his official run for the top office in the land, that he will join that conversation, too.