Om Malik has written an excellent blog entry on network neutrality. It’s definitely worth a read.
The pursuit of tolls based on content and application type requires something that does not exist in the Internet today. It requires a linkage between content type and transport. Equipment providers like Cisco increasingly deliver products offering packet by packet inspection in the name of network management, but implementing the access fees means giving billing systems the ability to monitor and track the types of applications and content customers use. Setting aside the chilling privacy concerns, the telephone networks linkage of usage to transport represents the primary obstacle to service creation I observed during five years at Bell Labs in the 1990s. Forcing innovators to change the network in order to implement an application means an end to innovation. The end of innovation means the end of growth in demand for Internet access.
The focus of Om’s entry in on the threat of innovation to incumbent broadband providers’ traditional revenue streams. I think his comment on his time at Bell Labs is telling, because it goes back to the net-head versus Bell-head debate of smart versus dumb networks. In the economic model that the Bell companies have been proposing is the resurgence of the smart network, where the Internet has traditionally been the domain of a dumb network with very smart applications and end devices.
While a “smart” network sounds like a very nice thing, what it really represents is a model for application delivery which relies on major revisions to network infrastructure. This comes through expensive, proprietary development and limited market access. In this model the incumbent network provider controls any new products or services, and those will be rolled out at a very slow pace and at very high incremental cost to subscribers. Look to the first implementations of call waiting, voice mail and caller ID as examples for the telco model of rolling out value-add functionality. It’s not pretty.
This proprietary model flies in the face of a number of trends in IT that have been influenced by the open standards-based environment that is the Internet. Think open source, think APIs, think enterprise applications based on off-the-shelf software tools from ERP vendors. All of this replaced models where very large teams of developers worked very hard at great expense for very small incremental improvements.
Hopefully Congress will look favorably on the concept of network neutrality and clarify the situation.
Tags: Net Neutrality
