Fight for Net Neutrality

Fred Wil­son did a great post high­light­ing to every­one that now is the time to take up the fight for Net Neu­tral­ity since the FCC is about to decide whether to sup­port the idea or not. The pro­posed rule-making doc­u­ment can be found online and the process to pro­vide com­ment is a lit­tle con­vo­luted so let me give you a small tutorial.

Fil­ing a comment

The FCC site is not the most intu­itive site in the world.

• To file a com­ment, one must first go the FCC’s elec­tronic fil­ing sys­tem.
• Once there, click on “Search for Pro­ceed­ings” and you will end up on a form.
• All you have to know is the pro­ceed­ing num­ber. In the case of net neu­tral­ity, that num­ber is 09–191
• Enter 09–191 in the box that says “Pro­ceed­ing Num­ber” and click the “Search for Pro­ceed­ings” button
• You’re now pretty close. As long as “Sta­tus” is Open, you can file a comment.
• Towards the top of the page, you will see a link to “Sub­mit a fil­ing for 09–191″ (you can skip the ear­lier steps if you want and just click on the link here) or you can look at what com­ments have been made already.
• Of note, you can’t file the com­ment via a web form. You need to upload a doc­u­ment with your com­ment in it. A bit of an extra has­sle but well worth it to pro­tect the net.
• Make sure that you filled all the required fields or your com­ment could get rejected.
• Once you filed your com­ment, you’ll get a con­fir­ma­tion num­ber and a page where you can check the sta­tus of your fil­ing (mine can be seen here)
• That’s it. Remem­ber that the dead­line is Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 14, 2009  so please do keep this in mind.

What I filed

Look­ing at the recent talks around the con­cept of net neu­tral­ity, I decided that I would just tackle some of the argu­ments against it, show­ing them to be based on noth­ing more than FUD. So I focused my com­ment on a small sec­tion of the findings.

Here’s what I said:

As men­tioned in the intro­duc­tory para­graphs of your pro­posed rule-making, the inter­net open­ness has not only been key to its suc­cess but also pro­vided entre­pre­neurs like myself with the abil­ity to fos­ter eco­nomic growth by cre­at­ing new com­pa­nies and new jobs.

To cre­ate a multi-tier sys­tem, as par­ties oppos­ing fur­ther actions by the com­mis­sion (as high­lighted in III, item 65), has the poten­tial of cre­at­ing cer­tain finan­cial bar­ri­ers that would pro­hibit inno­va­tion within the inter­net space. Let us not for­get that, while Skype is often used as an exam­ple of how suc­cess­ful broad­band access can enable new busi­ness mod­els, that com­pany (and a num­ber of sim­i­lar broadband-based offer­ings) was born out­side of the United States at a time when broad­band costs were cheaper in Europe than they were in the United States.

While the asser­tion that cer­tain types of traf­fic can impose greater bur­den on a net­work, this has unfor­tu­nately been the case for much inno­va­tion. Web traf­fic cre­ated greater bur­den on the phone net­work in the early 1990s. Chat ser­vices and instant mes­sag­ing cre­ated a greater bur­den on the net­works in the later 1990s. Voice Over IP, online video, music stores like iTunes and online games like World of War­craft have cre­ated a greater bur­den on the net­works. Yet each of those legal appli­ca­tions has pro­vided not only a new set of ben­e­fits in the form of new com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels or new ways to deliver enter­tain­ment but also improved the country’s econ­omy by pro­vid­ing some new engines for eco­nomic and job growth. It is not impos­si­ble that, in the not so dis­tant future, we would come to see the inter­net as the car­rier of data of voice for any appli­ca­tion, whether it is high def­i­n­i­tion 3D TV chan­nels, or high def­i­n­i­tion video telephony.

Third, the asser­tion that higher costs are required in order to fos­ter inno­va­tion seems to be counter to the actual data avail­able in the mar­ket­place. While it is clear that invest­ing in new infra­struc­ture spend is expen­sive, much of the costs cur­rently needed to pro­vide broad­band access to large por­tions of the coun­try are already sunk cost as the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion and cable indus­try over­spent in the 1990s on lay­ing down fiber that, to this day, is often still unlit. Invest­ing in new tech­nol­ogy to enhance the per­for­mance of net­works is gen­er­ally not the domain of those providers who are advo­cat­ing a less open sys­tem as they gen­er­ally do not research and invent the tools that allow for bet­ter net­work man­age­ment. Net­work improve­ments, in the final eco­nomic analy­sis, gen­er­ally hap­pen because the providers see a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in improv­ing the net­work, not because of net­work discrimination.

As a result, most of the argu­ments made in favor of net­work dis­crim­i­na­tion amount to scare tac­tics that have lit­tle basis in his­tor­i­cal facts. I dare hope the com­mis­sion will see through this sub­terfuge and pro­vide full sup­port for the prin­ci­ples of net neu­tral­ity high­lighted in your document.

I’m not gen­er­ally ask­ing much of my audi­ence but, in this case, I will make an excep­tion and ask you to please go and file a com­ment before Thurs­day. The future of the inter­net is in your hands: whether you want to keep the net open is up to you but you have to act now.