I have been troubled by the assertion by some advocate that net neutrality regulations are required in order to maintain the conditions that would allow the next great innovations to emerge. Other than emotional outbursts, there is little in the way of evidence to back up this view.
Conversely, we know that specific net neutrality regulations have never to date existed and so all the great internet applications we love have emerged in an era of unregulated internet service.
This has allowed market-based competition to flourish and fail among ISPs, providing choices for applications, content delivery as well as their consumers. Choices in network architecture and choices in pricing models.
Some spread fear about the idea that companies might deliver different quality for different payment schemes, as if every other product delivered in the world was on the basis of communal equivalence.
We may wish to give some thought to a proposition that a priority access service from some ISPs may actually facilitate a “new or poorly funded provider” (in the words of one of my commenters) to more effectively compete against more entrenched applications providers.
Some existing application providers own their own backbone facilities and directly interconnect with ISPs around the world, yielding outstanding network performance world-wide. How can a new entrant compete against such a well established application provider?
A start-up (say, with an application that needs low latency) that can’t replicate such a global reach may wish to buy a service on a flexible payment plan (such as % of revenues, number of simultaneous streams, etc.) which an ISP may sell to help them get exposed to a global audience faster.
Cisco is suggesting that half of all internet traffic will be video by the year 2012 compared to 22% in 2007. Streaming and interactive gaming services won’t tolerate average network latency. Add in the laws of physics that come into play if a user in Asia tries to connect to a server located in Canada.
Why would we want legislation that prevents innovators from buying network access to cost effectively compete the global reach of the entrenched software giants?