Today's New York Times article by Robert H. Frank is an excellent and clear explanation of how price discrimination best serves consumers. Mr. Frank is an economist at Cornell. One of his headlines says: "If price discrimination seems wrong, try taking another look."

The neutrality-ites have used buzz-word blackmail in Washington to try and make those who oppose NN as being "for discrimination." Discrimination is understandably a bad word politically becuase a lot of people have been unfairly and illegally discriminated against in our country's history and it still goes on today. 

Intel, a supporter of Itsournet.org and NN regulation, apparently hedged its NN bets yesterday, investing $600m in Clearwire, which does not have NN and which is Craig McCaw's WiMax venture to offer more broadband competition nationwide to the telephone, cable and wireless companies. Clearwire is a member of the WCA, the wireless broadband association, which recently joined NETCompetition.org as an e-forum member opposed to NN regulation.

This is Intel's biggest venture investment ever. Given the success of WiFi, which Intel strongly nurtured in order to accelerate the replacement cycle of laptops, they clearly see the same opportunity in WiMax. It is very important to note that WiFi has never been subject to NN rules nor has WiMax nor has Clearwire's WiMax-like technology. And to date Clearwire has offered a differentiated offering that it could not do if subjected to Snowe-Dorgan NN rules.

Neutrality-ites claim Network neturality is a principle.

Their defense of it belies the fact that NN is NOT principled.

They justify new NN regulation by asserting there is a duopoly and market failure. If the motivation is principled, why do Snowe-Dorgan and the Markey bills apply monopoly net neutrality rules to competitive broadband providers like wireless, new entrants like WiMax and free services like WiFi? If it is truly a necessary "competitive" principle, why not apply it to Microsoft, which the government ruled a monopoly, or Google and Yahoo which are quickly becoming the defacto duoploists of search? Real principles are not double standards like NN.

The Snowe-Dorgan net neutrality amendment failed 11-11.

I just released the following statement to reporters.

My friends Paul Meisner of Amazon, and Chris Libertelli of Skype-eBay, whom I personally respect, regularly say NN is not about philosophy in their frequent public defenses of the Net Neutrality. That may be nice and self-reassuring PR mantra, but it does not withstand scrutiny.  

I most respectfully have to disagree with Paul and Chris on this; net neutrality is the classic and central philosophical debate of the techcom era. 

NN is just a techcom version of the constant American struggle between the dual American political values that Americans hold dear: freedom and equality. When issues such as NN put these values in conflict, taking away commercial and individual freedoms to create net equality, it is a philosophical debate. Conservatives and Republicans tend to favor protecting freedom over promoting equality. Liberals and Democrats tend to favor promoting equality over protecting freedoms. 

In my debates on NN I run up against some myths that net neutrality-ites have popularlized. I plan to knock them down one by one over time.

Myth #1: Net neutrality is the way it has always been and NN proponents are just asking for a maintenance of the status quo.

That is only partially true and it gets less and less true every day. That's becuase NN was a monopoly era policy that is being phased out and made obsolete by the emergence of broadband competition. In other words, NN is a vestige of the dial-up world that will continue to phase out as people upgrade from the dial-up slow lane to the broadband fast lane. The FCC, supported by the Supreme Court, ruled that broadband could not be a monoploy market, becuase it was nascent and competitive market.