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Your article almost totally ignores more than a decade of lessons surrounding federal restraint and the Internet’s success in an effort to support federal “neutrality” regulations.

Once you try and define what is to be regulated, unintended consequences will surely result. If broadband providers are made liable in court for the way their pipes “carry” digitized information, you’re going to have Congress and FCC regulators writing rules that cover the basics of Internet traffic.

Do we really think the Internet will benefit by having government officials write rules on caching, collocation, packet prioritization and reassembly, and the like? And when these rules are challenged in court (meaning more delays), will that help or hurt efforts to improve America’s broadband deployment?

Trying to guess at a regulated formula for network neutrality that would protect the public interest and not impede innovation is on par with picking a perfect NCAA basketball bracket.

There’s another aspect of net neutrality that’s even more problematic: the way it mixes two separate entities, namely the public Internet and private networks. For twenty years, private networks have been helping business, government, universities, and others that need specialized communication. There’s nothing wrong with groups that are willing to pay a little extra because they need a specialized service – think of UPS vs. the postal service.

So if net neutrality regulations are passed, would federal regulators have to write separate rules for public vs. private networks? Would there be different federal rules for low-bandwidth IP services that use the public Internet and high-bandwidth services that don’t?

Entire forests will be sacrificed to produce all the legal and technical filings that would surround these and other neutrality questions. In my view, we’re far better off continuing on the sound path the Clinton Administration established and letting the technology continue to evolve unfettered.

Sincerely,

Mike McCurry
Co-chair, Hands Off the Internet coalition
www.HandsOff.org

Download pdf

Your article almost totally ignores more than a decade of lessons surrounding federal restraint and the Internet’s success in an effort to support federal “neutrality” regulations.

Once you try and define what is to be regulated, unintended consequences will surely result. If broadband providers are made liable in court for the way their pipes “carry” digitized information, you’re going to have Congress and FCC regulators writing rules that cover the basics of Internet traffic.

Do we really think the Internet will benefit by having government officials write rules on caching, collocation, packet prioritization and reassembly, and the like? And when these rules are challenged in court (meaning more delays), will that help or hurt efforts to improve America’s broadband deployment?

Trying to guess at a regulated formula for network neutrality that would protect the public interest and not impede innovation is on par with picking a perfect NCAA basketball bracket.

There’s another aspect of net neutrality that’s even more problematic: the way it mixes two separate entities, namely the public Internet and private networks. For twenty years, private networks have been helping business, government, universities, and others that need specialized communication. There’s nothing wrong with groups that are willing to pay a little extra because they need a specialized service – think of UPS vs. the postal service.

So if net neutrality regulations are passed, would federal regulators have to write separate rules for public vs. private networks? Would there be different federal rules for low-bandwidth IP services that use the public Internet and high-bandwidth services that don’t?

Entire forests will be sacrificed to produce all the legal and technical filings that would surround these and other neutrality questions. In my view, we’re far better off continuing on the sound path the Clinton Administration established and letting the technology continue to evolve unfettered. Sincerely,

Mike McCurry
Co-chair, Hands Off the Internet coalition
www.HandsOff.org

Download pdf