After the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, it seems that Meredith and McDreamy might be getting back together. But, as blogged by Shonda Rhimes (the show’s writer and creator), nothing is as easy on that show as it seems: “Just remember that nothing is ever wrapped up easily on this show.”

So, what if Addison were to return to New York, but responds to an urgent call from Seattle Grace to consult on a complicated surgery that just happens to be her specialty? But there’s a terrible blizzard in New York and she can’t fly to Seattle, so she assists via Internet? Great - thanks for pitching in, Addison! Or not. Consider, in a world with government-regulated Internet traffic, when the patient on the table is crashing and Addison needs to tell Bailey what to clamp or suture, the (Internet) tubes get clogged — with email. Flatline. Intubate. (Hands Off doesn’t actually know many medical terms.this is just for color.)

This scenario occurs to us not just because we’re excited about the return of Grey’s Anatomy to ABC’s primetime schedule, but because of a recent op-ed in the Martinsburg Journal that brought up one of the more serious, albeit underexplored, reasons to oppose new net neutrality laws: The needs of telemedicine. In the op-ed, health care writer Vanessa McLaughlin explains:

“Net neutrality advocates say every bit of Internet traffic should be treated alike. But that makes as much sense as an emergency room that eliminates triage and treats a broken nose with the same urgency as a heart attack. In an ER, some cases are more critical. On the Internet, some bits of data are more important. Medical data needs to get where it’s going fast and safe. If an e-mail or music video is delayed by a traffic jam on the network, the damage is minimal. If a medical transmission is disrupted, someone could die.”

That would surely make for an interesting episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s not something we would ever want anyone to deal with. And it’s just one more reason to oppose far-reaching new Internet regulations.

Larry Dignan from Baseline Magazine recently wrote an article guaranteed to get attention: “Why I’m Against Net Neutrality.” It was a good one, though we can’t say we agreed with every single bit. His primary argument — “Congress should stay out of this fracas between telecom giants and Internet companies” – is certainly a solid one. Here’s one great section that echoes much of what we’ve been saying for awhile:

“All traffic isn’t created equal. An e-mail doesn’t have the same service requirements as a VoIP call. An X-ray of a heart patient should have priority over a Britney Spears video. Corporate networks manage traffic that way, and at some point there has to be some intelligence added to public Internet infrastructure between the end-points. Intelligent networks could offer better security, route traffic more efficiently and generally make the Internet easier to operate. Net neutrality requirements mean all traffic is created equal. You can debate over who makes the call over what traffic gets priority, but to pretend all traffic is equal doesn’t hold up.”

For much of this debate, we’ve seen too many people try to equate the switching of electronic packets along a global network with human civil rights, and it’s a bad analogy. Networks simply have different imperatives than human societies, and to pretend otherwise only confuses the situation.

In the spirit of coming together, we’re taking a temporary pass on our usual commentary to focus on an issue that deserves to unite the Internet community. Recently, Hands Off The Internet co-chair Chris Wolf delivered opening remarks at the Third International Symposium on Hate on the Internet in Toronto.

Chris was speaking in his capacity as chair of the International Network Against Cyber-Hate based in The Netherlands. Despite his background as a litigator – or perhaps because of it – he urged the audience to consider that laws addressed at Internet hate are perhaps the LEAST EFFECTIVE way to deal with the problem. They often create a sense of false security promoting inaction and under use of the other tools available to fight online hate.

As he noted, there are exceptions:

“The Web Site of neo-Nazi Bill White posting civil rights lawyer Richard Warman’s address and urging others to take violent action against him is plainly illegal even in the land of First Amendment. It is a travesty that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) could not fashion an immediate remedy to protect Mr. Warman and his family. In at least one U.S. jurisdiction, covering California and much of the West, the highest appellate court – the Ninth Circuit – has ruled that specific threats like that addressed to Mr. Warman justifies an injunction shutting down the Web Site containing the threats, as well as millions of dollars in damages. And that is the right result.”

But that said, the reflexive use of the law to deal with online hate speech threatens to weaken respect for the law if such attempted law enforcement fails or is used against minor violations.

To read a copy of Chris’ speech, click here.

“I have dozens of friends and the fun never ends
That is, as long as I’m buying”
–”Too Much Time On My Hands,” Styx

In the spirit of being kinder and gentler, let’s recognize our friends at Amazon for their latest effort to turn the Internet into a venue resembling the Los Angeles 405 at rush hour.

Recently, the company unveiled its new video download service. Interested web viewers will be able to check out “Jimmy Neutron”, “Three Kings” and if they’re really desperate, episodes of “Laguna Beach.” With this program, Amazon aspires to send additional terabytes of data to consumers in the form of TV shows, sports events and movies. (By the way, one terabyte = 1000 gigabytes.)

And there’s the problem.

The only way to accommodate the spiraling demands for instant data transfer from Amazon and its online brethren is through expensive network deployment. But if Net neutrality regulations become law, Amazon and its ilk will have a perfectly legal loophole to avoid paying anything for the massive new bandwidth they consume.

So if these guys don’t pay for the bandwidth cost they use, guess who will?

As Jay Leno would say, “You can’t write ‘em any better than this!”

According to Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Google is upset with the city government there for not moving fast enough in deploying wireless Net access. The deployment date has slid to 2007 and the city, at least according to Google, is making new and unreasonable demands.

“Every meeting is like the first,” according to the Google official in charge.

This is so ironic it’s almost beyond belief!

Could this be the same Google that’s lobbying for the Feds to start a massive new regulation of VPNs and the Internet? If that ever happens, our online experience will be answerable to a multi-headed Hydra of unelected regulators and judges that makes the San Francisco team look like a vaudeville act.

Google’s actions have the unmistakable markings of a company so entranced with its own virtue that it just assumes government regulators will bow down before it. (Remind anyone of…Martha Stewart maybe? …Although she did make blintzes on the Today Show this morning that looked delicious).

The problem is that making the Internet subject to the vagaries of lawmakers looking to protect a favored company means parochial concerns can quickly trump the greater good. As a former President might have put it, if Google thinks that San Francisco regulators are troublesome, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

Interesting comment from FCC chairman Kevin Martin at his Senate renomination hearing last week:
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“Martin said he did not oppose Google charging more to companies for higher-profile placement on their search engine, and likewise did not opposed a telephone company like Verizon charging more for higher-bandwidth services like streaming video, suggesting that if they could not, they might not be able to afford to provide those services.”

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Martin’s pegged the so-called Net neutrality issue in two ways.� First, there’s no doubt that if Congress passes this, the online giants like Google and Amazon will have a legal loophole to avoid paying for the broadband access they consume.
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But there’s a larger issue too.� Martin’s also right about the inevitable problems of bringing in complex new regulations over something as dynamic as the Internet.� As recent history shows pretty decisively, the Net has a way of humbling companies that make things difficult for consumers.�
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Exhibit A:
Microsoft’s MSN

Exhibit B:
Dell’s “DJ Ditty”, which was supposed to dethrone the iPod.�

Exhibits C, D, E, F & G:
Google’s instant messaging service (Ranked 10th in IM services with just 2 percent of MSN’s users),
Google’s online spreadsheet service (Supposedly a challenger to Yahoo’s leading service, it ranks 40th among financial websites),
Google’s blog search (It generates only about 17 percent of the traffic of Technorati),
Google’s networking site Orkut (It has less than one percent of MySpace’s traffic), and
Google’s email (It has only about a quarter of the users of Yahoo and MSN’s mail service)
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That’s why Net users should heed the warnings from David Farber, Kevin Martin and other independent Internet analysts – an active consumer base is a far cheaper and more effective solution than piles of new government regulation over the Net.

Scott Cleland gives a short refresher on what’s happened in the so-called net neutrality fight so far, which also puts in perspective claims by advocates of reduced customer choice (such as Google and Save the Internet) that they have “momentum” right now:

Remember, Net neutrality proponents need Congress to pass a new law in order to win and achieve their purposes. In May, the Markey NN bill failed badly in the House 269-152. In June the FCC rejected calls for NN to be required in approving the Adelphia purchase by Comcast and Time Warner. In July, NN failed again in the Senate Commerce Committtee 11-11 on a straight party line vote, however after that defeat, four of the Commerce Committee Democrats abandoned NN and voted to support the Stevens Bill 15-7 — without the Snowe-Dorgan Bill. In August, the FTC Chairman gave a very detailed speech seeing no need for additional NN legislation and chided the NN proponents for not being able to define the problem or for not submitting any formal complaints to them or providing any real evidence of a problem.

It may not be momentum, but it sure is inertia. Meanwhile, the ever-wise Richard Bennett updates us on the claims of a broadband “duopoly” by activists for more red tape:

What was that about a cable/telco duopoly? Sorry, but technology marches on and today’s reality is tomorrow’s history.

Read the whole thing.