My post addressed the net neutrality issue specifically. While I don’t think the FCC is the greatest arbiter of this issue, the arguement that “The Internet should be free to grow, with minimal regulatory and tax interference” seems bogus and scaremongering. Of course we want minimal regulation. But it would be impossible to have the Internet at all without some regulation. Regulation prevents chaos. A reglulation that prevents monoplistic corporations from hoarding and parceling out bandwidth to the highest bidders sounds like one I could live with. And throwing the tax issue in there is a red herring. This has nothing to do with taxes.

“The cost of cable TV could get cheaper if a bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday becomes law. HR5252 would allow phone companies, such as Verizon, ‘to get television franchises by applying to the Federal Communications Commission rather than by negotiating them one by one with thousands of municipalities,’ reported the Washington Post. The phone companies then would compete directly with cable TV companies, such as Time Warner Cable, producing lower costs and better service for consumers.

“Most significantly, a so-called ‘net neutrality’ amendment to the bill was defeated. ‘Net neutrality’ would have given the FCC power to regulate extra charges that the phone and cable companies might charge content providers for faster service. . . . Bottom line: The Internet should be free to grow, with minimal regulatory and tax interference.”

- Orange County Register, 6/11/06

It’s almost more about packet priority, rather than speed. Although speed is part of the equation.

Say AT&T offered video. That’ one aspect of the new COPE bill that says telcos can enter the video content provider space. Whose video packets do you think they will give priority to? Their own, or Google’s, or yours? What they want to be able to do is charge money to anyone who wants their video to have the same priority over their part of the network as their own video. If you served video on your site, could you afford to compete with Google? No. This means Google’s video (if Google agrees to pay, and Google is in favor of Net Neutrality so it’s not clear they would) will get to the end user faster and with fewer glitches than your video. This makes it harder for the small guy to get noticed, to compete with the larger corporations.