Tech reporter Andrew Orlowski likes controversial subjects, and some of our favorite reporting by him tweaks the assumptions the “net neutrality” die-hards take for conventional wisdom. His latest is for the (liberal) UK Guardian, and the whole thing is required reading. His depiction of the pro-regulation movement as head-in-the-sand conspiracy theorists is certainly amusing, and we suspect he has a point. And their unwillingness (or unfamiliarity) with the technical aspects of how networks actually work only makes them look foolish:

Save The Internet took full advantage of rational fears, argues veteran internet engineer Richard Bennett, but in doing so, it created “an Intelligent Design for the Left”.

“The gap between fear and reality is even more stark when the technical issues are examined. The Neutrality amendments rejected by Congress last year would have made many of today’s private contracts illegal, and outlawed the techniques such as “traffic shaping” that ISPs use to curb bandwidth hogs, says Bennett.

“Even worse was the long-term chilling effect. Neutrality would have made designing a better internet much harder, says the man commonly described as the father of the internet.

“Dr Robert Kahn says that Neutrality legislation poses a fundamental threat to internet research because it misunderstands what the internet really is; it’s a network of networks, and experimentation on private networks must be encouraged. “The internet has never been neutral,” explains Crowcroft. “Without traffic shaping, we won’t get the convergence that allows the innovation on TV and online games that we’ve seen in data and telephony.

Vocal “net neutrality” kids want one network to rule them all, and they seem oblivious to the fact that it doesn’t work that way and never will. We say: Let a thousand networks bloom.