Today, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a speech at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. addressing one of the most contentious issues facing the technology industry today - so-called "Net Neutrality". Stacey at Gigaom and Maggie Reardon at C/NET have both written excellent analysis of this speech and the potential policy ramifications.
We're all familiar with the two sides of this issue. One side wants the Internet completely open, so that all traffic is treated equally, regardless of the network it traverses - and they want laws and policies that reflect that. The other side feels that regulation of the Internet is unnecessary and that without the ability to manage their networks, consumers will face significantly degraded performance, while a tech-savvy minority dominate most of the Internet's capacity (a la BitTorrent).
For consumers, as well as companies like Netflix, Google, Skype and others, this was an important win that should result in policies that allow unfettered access any lawful content, application or service of their choice over the Internet. For carriers and ISPs, the impact is unclear, since the "reasonable network management" policies alluded to in the chairman's speech are unclear.
What is clear is that the tone of discussion around these issues is more rapidly degrading. I'm reminded of the debate on healthcare policy and how distortions, ad hominem attacks and vitrolic tirades seem to dominate. Many of the same people that complain to me about the distortions in the healthcare debate (and rightly so) go frothy at the mouth when it's suggested that carriers may need to prioritize and manage the traffic crossing the networks they built - a pretty reasonable request considering the billions that have been sunk into creating this infrastructure.
Now, I'll be the first to agree that trusting profit-driven organizations to always do the right thing without any oversight got us here. I also believe that we should have access to any application we choose. But we cannot ignore simple facts such as P2P's dominance of Web traffic, the impact of data-intensive applications on wireless networks, and that there are definitely bandwidth hogs that steal bandwidth from many less savvy consumers (among myriad other issues). Likewise, I think we can all agree that there isn't a bottomless pit of money that enables ISPs to immediately upgrade infrastructure while staying solvent.
The Obama administration seems to have approached this issue in a similar vein to healthcare - by taking the needs and issues of both sides into account. As responsible consumers, I think we also need to be aware that there are valid issues in this debate that are going unrecognized. And perhaps, if we want to make a truly informed decision, that we try to see both sides of the issue.