Game On For Net Neutrality

The FCC's abrupt intervention last Friday into the quarrel between Apple and Google may have won more than a stay of execution for Google Voice; it may have heralded the beginning of a wide-ranging net neutrality movement in Washington of which Google has long been a proponent.Although the timing was clearly coincidental (bills take weeks to draft and the FCC was moved to act on an event that took place earlier the same week), House Democrats Ed Markey and Anna Eshoo introduced the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009" (IFPA) on Thursday afternoon, a day before the FCC's action.

If nothing else, IFPA answers detractors who claim net neutrality supporters can't define net neutrality, and explicitly states why this legislation is necessary:

Among other things, IFPA prohibits network operators from:

discriminating against or giving preferential treatment with regards to the delivery of content or applications; preventing anyone from accessing the Internet; charging content or service providers extra fees to deliver particular types of content; preventing users from attaching or using devices unless they harm the operator's network; and prioritizing any content, application or service over any other. IFPA also imposes transparency requirements on network operators, forcing them to disclose detailed information about the speed, nature, and limitations of their services.

Art Brodsky of advocacy group Public Knowledge blogged on HuffingtonPost that the bill

Earlier efforts at enacting net neutrality legislation or regulations were scuttled by promises from industry bigwigs that they would never engage in discriminatory behavior, even to protect their business interests.

But discrimination against the likes of Skype, EchoStar (Slingbox), BitTorrent and now Google Voice seem to have provided enough evidence to the contrary, and it looks like Congress is about to act. And to no one's surprise, Julius Genachowski is running a much more consumer-friendly FCC than his predecessor.

Brodsky notes:

There are those who will argue that the operators haven't given government any reason to interfere or, more radically, that government should simply keep its mitts off altogether. They argue that in the long run, the market always sorts things out, forgetting that, as John Maynard Keynes once said, "in the long run we're dead."

Meanwhile, they also conveniently forget that while Al Gore didn't invent it, the Internet isn't a private venture that sprang ex nihilo from the forehead of some captain of industry; it is the outcome of decades of taxpayer-funded research by government and academia. The Internet is a indeed a public good that shouldn't be quietly ceded to a few well-placed conglomerates who would do what they always do, which is act in their own self interest -- and the devil with the rest of us.