Neutrality

Not quite a week after the mid-term elections, President Obama made a statement about net neutrality: He's for it.  The release includes four main "bright-line rules" on what this means, copied below:

• No blocking.  If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it.  That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.

• No throttling.  Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.

• Increased transparency.  The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment.  So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.

• No paid prioritization.  Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee.  That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth.  So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.

Is this the sort of big problem that we should be expecting The Government to solve during the Crisis? It seems within the authority of at least some part of the government to regulate how Internet Service Providers work, especially where the service requires infrastructure that supports a natural monopoly. There might also be a case in claiming that improving access is a public good which will offset the costs necessary for official government support - presumably because the improvement will consist of more than supporting viral video producers.

But are any of those reasons valid, and does this net neutrality proposal help with the problem? That's less clear. It can be difficult to see a difference between having Netflix pay extra because they are a competitor to cable companies, and Netflix having to make additional payments because their content consists of a significant fraction of all broadband usage. Still, for the President it's important to occasionally try for bigger projects, because in this gridlocked era the only way to make an impression is to swing for the bleacher seats.