The issue of net neutrality came home to me personally the other day, when I got a sales call from my home TV Cable and Internet Broadband provider. Comcast isn’t satisfied with tv and internet, but wants me to purchase my telephone service from them, too, for $40 per month for unlimited service. Not a terrible price, but I asked the sales person why I would purchase Comcast phones at $40 rather than Vonnage at $25 or even Sunrocket at $200 a year. Her answer was chilling:
What if you had Sunrocket or Vonage and your internet service slowed down so the other VOIP phone service didn’t work very well?
I don’t think that this was a threat, and I doubt that Comcast would really do something like that. But why couldn’t they under current law? This is not an easy issue: if Comcast has built an Internet system and wants to make certain that its customers for VOIP telephone or streaming video or what gets excellent service, why shouldn’t it be able to route such service on lines that are closely monitored and send other content on ordinary lines? Lines, that may be subject to generally poorer service?
I have some sympathy with the argument, except that one of the foundations of the Internet and its Web overlay, is that data are data. It doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) matter whether a particular data set, when reconstructed at its destination, turns out to be a video, an audio file, e-mail, a banking transaction, or whatever else. The net was always been, in effect, a common carrier. The high speed ISP, today, has a natural monopoly, or at least shares a duopoly — basically cable or DSL. Should it be allowed to use its power in one type of service to sell another?
Of course, “always has been” doesn’t mean it “always should be”, but what if your ISP decided to slow down your VOIP telephone service so it could charge you more for its own service?
Leave a Reply