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It's conventional wisdom. When it comes to communicating with the public, most companies take the safest path. They usually play their cards pretty close to their chest. I'm joining the blogsosphere to challenge that "wisdom."

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bofkentucky

Google's request for a neutral net is a very altruistic position given their domination of many sectors of internet content. If someone builds a better youtube tomorrow on a neutral net people can transition to it without hinderance.

What the Comcast's and Verizon's of the world have proposed is prioritizing itunes music store traffic versus yahoo or microsoft's music store. Apple would use their dominance in the pay-per-track audio market to negotiate a positive throttle rate with the major isp's for themselves and/or a negative throttle rate for their competitors, furthering their dominance of the market.

The real danger is in the phone market, both the telco's and cable co's have investments in phone deployment they would love to hang onto without skype, vonage and similar products buzzing around cutting into their margins. Any ISP has the capability to cut "unblessed" voip off at the knee's just like comcast has attempted to do with bittorrent or att and apple have done with voip over wifi calls on the iphone.

Not to long ago you were complaining about the telco's sitting on dsl to protect their T-1 markets and Comcast and TW had to fight telco protectionism on the telephone interconnect rules in North Carolina. The telco's complain about the cable companies fighting them tooth and nail on statewide video franchising. It looks to the consumer that instead of two "equals" wanting to fight each other on equal terms, driving down pricing and increasing quality of service that both industries would rather attempt to destroy competition leaving the customer with a monopoly for all their data, voice and video. Neither side has proven themselves worthy of the trust to not hinder their customers

sineswiper

I believe that Google's role in Net Neutrality is not financial or anything sinister. Characteristically, they don't behave in that matter. It's really a POV issue, and how each side believes they are trying to ruin the Internet.

The Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality has some good insight on why this issue was even brought up:

"In early 2005 the FCC enforced network neutrality principles in a documented case of abuse involving Madison River Communications, a small DSL provider that briefly blocked VoIP service."

Before that, it was just talks and papers. Now, some ISP decided to -BLOCK- VoIP service, including 911 service, in the name of promoting their own phone service. The Internet exploded with this grave concern that any ISP could interfere with Internet service for profit. This is not unlike the porting numbers issue that Verizon got smacked on.

The sides provided their positions. The pro-NN side wants to make sure that nothing like the MRC indident doesn't happen again, and further prevent even slowing down a site for company gain. The anti-NN side wants to make sure that massive P2P traffic from the 2% of the network doesn't overtake the network, and can still be managed for the rest of the 98% that just want to surf the web, read emails, and play games.

BOTH sides have valid arguments and concerns. I think the sooner either side realize this, the better they can hash out a proper compromise.

Scott Ritcher

Is the issue of net neutrality relevant in markets where there is only one cable internet provider?

If Mr. Willner is so pissed off about the marketplace being regulated, let's open up the Louisville market to competition.

"They are outraged when someone suggests that they need to be regulated while they simultaneously seek to regulate others."

Moose Head

No competition in Louisville? What about Dish or DirecTV? Don't you get AT&T's offers for their combined service.

If you don't like Insight, there's a competitor just a phone call away. Not that you'd catch me attaching a satellite dish to my roof. Insight has always treated me just fine.

Richard Bennett

I'm glad you like my piece, Michael. It was published in the San Fran Chronicle on Wednesday, and reprinted in the Washington Times on Saturday. It isn't often that these two papers agree that a particular viewpoint should be aired, but they did in this case.

Commenter bofkentucky is a little off-target on the role of neutrality in Google's strategy. Google owns a private network of very expensive data centers, which intersects the public Internet at several points. Some 20% of the Internet's traffic comes from Google/YouTube. This traffic isn't regulated by Net Neutrality.

And it's the sheer volume of traffic that Google releases on the public Internet that gives them control over Vonage, Skype, et. al.

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