The DOJ just announced it opposes net-neutrality. As I see it, the two sides of the fence on net-neutrality are: 1. those who believe the Internet is now commerce driven and built (infrastructure wise) on the bottom line and 2. those who believe that the equality of access inherent in today’s Internet is more important than commerce. There are those that sit in between the two ends of that spectrum, but I think that captures it. Note that net-neutrality is really about inter-isp charging, not within an ISP, since they do that already (ie: $20/mo for 1.5 mb or $40/mo for 3mb). I would suggest there are two problems (and I am sure more) with either of these precepts:

  1. I2 is being currently developed and rolled out in the university settings - and universities (in terms of infrastructure development) are not thinking about it from a direct revenue standpoint. This is very similar to when the original Internet rolled out (although that included military - which really isn’t thinking about it from a revenue standpoint). When that begins to rollout (or some flavor of it) to the general public, integration into anything other than a net-neutral environment will be a challenge - and immediately affect any company relying on a tiered approach for reveue.
  2. Traffic is traffic is traffic: There will have to be some kind of serious packet filtering going on to regulate traffic. As soon as you do that - you’ll get hackers who work around it.

Now - for us there is a third thing: client to client traffic (p2p). Who pays for that? If we move to a tiered charging scheme, that would usually suggest charging businesses for faster connectivity, ie: charging Apple for fast pipes from the iTunes store. But what about bit torrent methodology - where many users contribute to a download? Do you charge each bit torrent user for using the application? For uploading another couple megabytes of files? I don’t think that will fly. The real problem for a tiered approach for bandwidth in terms of p2p is that the traffic is spread around “in the cloud”, it’s not centrazlied. Unless you levey a charge on ALL users, then you run into trouble. So - leverage the charge on all users and you’re right back to net-neutrality. Walter, in the comment below, is exactly right - there has to be some type of structure and regulation to it, or else we’re going to encounter a total mess.

Originally published on WordPress on September 07, 2007. Migrated to this blog on May 29, 2025.