About Professor Tim Wu’s recent New York Times oped, a few comments:

His essay begins, “If we aren’t careful, [the U.S. is] going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.” Really? If the past decade shows anything, it’s the stunning progress America has made in improving the availability of new and better broadband options. In short, precisely the opposite of a bandwidth cartel.

A decade ago (not adjusting for inflation), basic DSL cost $70/month in Pennsylvania, $60/month in the Rocky Mountain states, and $90/month in California. Since then, prices have plunged while online speeds and access choices have surged. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi spots are in every coffee shop and more than 15 million users have signed up for wireless broadband, which is also getting faster.

Seems like a pretty odd “cartel.”

Wu’s major focus is on what he calls the “pressing need to explore all alternative supplies of bandwidth before it is too late.” But the idea of adding bandwidth alone is a discredited (and monumentally expensive!) model for handling consumers’ Internet needs. Even the Japanese, with their sophisticated networks, have accepted the need to manage traffic data to keep up with P2P filesharing.

The real problem with Wu’s argument is that it almost completely ignores the need for across-the-board investment incentives – for unproven and proven technologies. To take one example, PBS technologist Bob Cringely recently observed that Cisco’s new Nexus 7000 router, when fully tricked-out, could support around one million concurrent users. He continued that this will “undoubtedly set a new low cost point for per-subscriber hardware” and that Cisco “is going to sell a lot of these puppies” to IPTV providers.

That’s the kind of technology coming to market and consumers will wind up the beneficiaries as quality improves and prices continue to drop.

But the key is that will only happen if the regulatory climate remains conducive to investment, network management and new deployment. Judging by Prof. Wu’s previous embrace of Net neutrality and his selective silence on network management and new investment, this is a reality he should consider.

We were surprised to see TechDirt’s over-the-top reaction to one of our posts this week, “Hands Off the Wireless Spectrum.” If our characterization of their position as “reluctant” was wrong, we apologize. But we have nothing to apologize for in terms of our legitimate and substantive role in this important public policy debate.

Our focus is on the nation’s broadband needs and on the facts. Facts are neither honest nor dishonest — they are the facts — and people can reach their own conclusions over what the facts mean in terms of whether we need new laws on net neutrality. We happen to think we don’t need new laws, because the facts we have been pointing out for some time are these:

• There is no problem to solve. Nobody has shown that there have been any meaningful breaches of basic neutrality on the web. Pro-regulation activists have tried to make case studies out of AOL, Cox and a Canadian telecom firm, and none of those bore out. (This may have something to do with why you never hear about those situations anymore). Broadband providers are committed to a robust, uncensored Internet and also aware of the consumer outcry if they provide anything less.

• Nobody has effectively argued that current laws are insufficient to deal with any possible market abuses that could potentially arise in the future.

• More fathers of the Internet, including Dave Farber and Robert Kahn, have come forward to express their reservations about imposing net neutrality laws than have come forward to support such laws. That is because regulation has the real potential of adverse unintended consequences.

• It is probable and even likely that in the not-too-distant-future, worldwide demand for broadband will exceed existing capacity. A massive new build-out to handle that capacity is needed, and net neutrality would effectively require broadband providers to pass the cost of that build-out on to consumers exclusively.

• The Internet has never been “neutral” in the way that net neutrality activists claim. There is no utopia to return to; the Net has always been a mishmash of “best effort delivery” networks and loose agreements. Having smart networks, which net neutrality regulation would prohibit, will help to rationalize and improve the existing situation.

• In Canada, where a similar debate is occurring, their CTC bureaucracy is so mired in red tape they can’t even remove online death threats against human rights attorney Richard Warman.

• Dorgan-Snowe’s first effect would be to freeze the broadband marketplace exactly where it is, disallowing not just theoretical abuses but new innovations, too.

• The United States ranks 16th worldwide in access to broadband Internet.

• Hands Off the Internet has always endorsed the four principles of net neutrality: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.” We even took out a print ad last year to say so.

TechDirt, maybe we’re not so different. If we agree that the basic ideas of net neutrality are inoffensive but mandating them into law could be a disastrous move, then there’s more to agree on than disagree

How bad is that Skype/eBay “wireless net neutrality” petition to the FCC we’ve been talking about the last few days? Tech Liberation Front (a great blog you should be reading, if you aren’t already) gives good gist:

The Skype-Wu proposal would foreclose such marketplace experimentation by essentially converting cellular networks into a sort of quasi-commons and forcing private network operators to provide network access or services on someone else’s terms.

What does that mean in the big picture? TLF has one idea:

In my opinion, when you get right down to it, this proposal is a declaration of surrender. That is, Skype and Prof. Wu almost seem to be saying that while it’s nice we’ve seen innovation at the core of the wireless sector over the past two decades, we now need to get on with the important business of establishing rules to ensure the maximum amount of output or innovation at the edge of networks while largely ignoring what happens at the core, or even prohibiting certain things from happening at the core. In other words, to maximize the freedom to innovate at the edge of networks, we must now restrict the freedom to innovate at the core in some ways.

And of course, the same is true with “wired net neutrality.” The regulationist side likes to claim they are protecting innovation, but what the companies pushing hardest — Google, eBay and Amazon — really want to do is freeze the market where it is now, with each at the top of their own game.

Regulation rarely is good for any kind of competition, let alone prohibitionist regulation like the Dorgan-Snowe bill under consideration in the Senate now. Online and on the airwaves, it still makes the most sense to hold off and deal with problems if they ever actually materialize.