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I am on the Congressional Internet Caucus wireless panel Wednesday with Blair Levin of Stifel Nicolaus, Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation, and Jason Devitt of Skydeck.

The panel is on: "Opening up 700 MHz & White Spaces" What hath the FCC wrought?"

• Should be interesting given that I am the only panelist not under the influence of "openness"...

In a stunningly naive, parochial, and innacurate opinion piece, "Keeping a lid on broadband," Computerworld national correspondent Kevin Mitchell has scathing criticism of current free market communications policies (that by the way were modeled after the computer sector's free market and innovation successes) and calls for government bureaucrats to regulate most everything of import in the communications sector.   

I am stunned that in the journalistic "world of computers" there could be such a naive and parochial view of the real-world ramifications of technological and digital convergence -- the rapidly blurring lines between computing, communications and storage. Mr. Mitchell writes like the tech sector and computing in general is an impregnable and immutable island that should forever be insulated and protected from competitive and market forces occuring outside the tech sector.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) entered the fray on net neutrality yesterday in an important ACLU blogpost: "Free Speech and Net Neutrality: Separating fact from fiction."

While the ACLU predictably voiced strong POLITICAL support for net neutrality, the ACLU Blog surprisingly and effectively eviscerated the LEGAL and practical case for using the analogy that "Net Neutrality is the First Amendment of the Internet."

• ACLU blog: "At the same time, the First Amendment is not directly implicated because unlike the government, your ISP is not a traditional "state actor" — a requirement for triggering First Amendment cases."
  • Duh.
  • The ACLU makes plain what any junior high civics student knows -- that the First Amendment is there to prevent the Government from abridging individuals freedom of speech -- not companies or other individuals.
  • This badly flawed "First Amendment" analogy only highlights how net neutrality proponents are loose with the facts and analogies. 
    • The net neutrality movement is "all slogan and no substance."

Net neutrality is not about free speech. It's classic buzzword political blackmail. Proponents cynically believe that if they repeat the conspiracy theory that big corporations want to systematically take away their customers freedom of speech -- that some people will believe it.

We'll soon see if net neutrality proponents are reasonable and responsible. Do they grasp that calling for preemptive, anti-investment, regulation of broadband that would discourage deployment of broadband to all Americans -- is the last thing our Nation needs during this economic downturn?

• The reality is that forward-thinking broadband deregulation has spurred massive investment in broadband and Internet infrastructure in the U.S. and this investment is spurring adoption of broadband faster than any communication service in American history.
• Moreover, an unfettered broadband economy and infrastructure is key to capturing the economic and productivity gains of more universally-adopted broadband.

Broadband deployment, adoption, competition and investment is one of the great success stories of our economy.

• The last thing our teetering economy needs right now is preemptive, anti-investment, net neutrality regulation of our cutting-edge communications sector that would only hurt the overall American economy.
• This is no time for solutions in search of a problem.
• We face real economic problems which require responsible broadband policies.  

Network World has a great piece: "Open Access not as important to wireless consumers as QoS, pricing, survey finds" which exposes the Google-led tech industry's push for open access as a not-so-subtle tech-industrial policy.

• The survey by Compete, Inc. found:
  • Only 9% of wireless users did not believe they had enough options for handsets;
  • Only 11% of wireless users believe that their carrier offered them too little content and services to meet their needs;
  • In stark contrast, 93% of wireless users believe getting a phone at a reasonable price was either important or very important.

This survey is important evidence exposing the tech industry's attempt to pass net neutrality/open access legislation/regulation as an thinly-guised tech industrial policy.

• This tech industrial policy is asking the government to intervene and mandate engineering design and pass price-related regulations that would de facto choose tech companies as market winners and communications companies as market losers.

The tech industry has done a good job of cloaking their openness campaign as what consumers want most -- because that serves their Washington industrial policy agenda.

Common sense dictates that the FCC will rule in favor of the critical necessity of broadband network management and against the FreePress and Vuze petitions which claim that prioritizing p2p traffic is an unlawful violation of the FCC's network neutrality principles. 

• No one should mistake the FCC doing its job in investigating significant allegations (by issuing public notices for comments), for an FCC predilection against reasonable network management in favor of net neutrality supremacy.

The common sense case why network management trumps net neutrality:

First, the petitions violate common sense because the petitions are based on a false predicate and presumption. The petitions assume that the FCC's policy of network neutrality principles have the legal and binding effect of formal FCC rules or law and that they trump all existing law and rules. This is preposterous. Just because the petitioners make an impassioned and PR-manipulative plea for that view -- does not mean their petition holds any water.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that net neutrality proponents have not thought through the logical and practical implications of their call for mandating net neutrality. 

• Practically, net neutrality is about codifying Internet architecture design rules for the first time, which would have the real world effect of blocking, degrading and impairing innovation to allow the Internet to support "cloud computing" -- the future of computing according to Google, IBM and many others.

Why does net neutrality theory not work in practice?

First, net neutrality is really backward-looking, trying to take the Internet back to the dial-up/pre broadband days when there was monopoly telecom regulation and not inter-modal broadband competition like there is today.

Second, consider net neutrality's definition by its primary proponents:

CNET has a great article: New Hampshire voters: Net Neutrality? Huh? that exposes what we all know -- that net neutrality is a niche special interest issue that is not at all on the minds of average Americans.

It's not surprising because:

• The term "net neutrality" was only coined in 2002 by Columbia law Professor Tim Wu, and no one outside the FCC community heard about the issue until early 2006 when Google funded a big Moveon.org effort to make net neutrality an issue; and
• There is no real problem only largely manufactured incidents or admitted mistakes that the Moveon.org folks are trying to staple together into a broader pattern or problem.

Not only has every governmental body that has reviewed this issue rejected the call for net neutrality regulation/legisation, the American people aren't aware of the issue or the term. 

Kudos CNET for bringing another dose of the real world to this bogus issue.    

Washington Internet Daily reported that FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell told reporters yesterday:

• that "...he wants ISPs and P2P networks to come to terms on dealing with bandwidth-hogging downloads. Comcast’s approach drew a complaint to the FCC, but McDowell hopes companies can work things out without government intervention..."
• “We’ll just mess it up,” he said. “I strongly encourage private sector resolution.”
• It’s not necessarily anticompetitive for network operators to act to keep P2P traffic from slowing networks, he said. “That's good for consumers, because you don't want your network to shut down.”"

Well said.

If you want to test the validity, appropriateness or reasonableness of a so-called inviolate "principle" like net neutrality, it can be instructive to apply that principle in a different context to see if it makes sense.

What if we passed a law that all health care had to be neutral?

• That all patient treatment always had to be just the same?  
• That any prioritization of patient treatment would be deemed illegal discrimination?

What would be the nonsensical result of such a broad imposition of a "neutral" medical treatment mandate?