… guide the FCC's work on technology and engineering issues, together with the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology. He will advise on matters across the agency to ensure that FCC policies are driving technological innovation, including serving as a resource to FCC Commissioners. He will also help the FCC engage with technology experts outside the agency and promote technical excellence among agency staff. He will be based in the FCC's Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis.

Henning brings an excellent background to this role, having been one of the co-authors of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP - RFC 3261) and the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP - RFC 3550 and 1889), the two main standards used in most Voice over IP (VoIP) systems today. Henning is also the author/co-author of over 70 other RFCs and countless Internet-Drafts and has been active with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) since the 1990's. He also served on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

Given the recent FCC workshops on the transition of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to new technologies, it's great to have someone with Henning's background and knowledge in a prominent role at the FCC. Henning himself noted this in an email to the IETF DISPATCH working group mailing list, where he noted that the FCC is definitely seeking input from technical folks.

Obviously in this new role he'll be working not only with real-time communications but also with the wide range of other areas that the FCC covers. Regardless, it's excellent to have someone with Henning's background providing this level of advice and input to FCC activities.

Prior to joining the FCC, Henning has been a professor and chair of the Computer Science department at Columbia University. In my experience he's also just an all-around decent person and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he'll do at the FCC.

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies for over 20 years

In June, the net neutrality debate took an unexpected turn when the Netherlands leap-frogged the USA to became the first country to legislate for mobile net neutrality. Business models for fixed and mobile networks must shift toward volume charges.

The net neutrality debate has been seen not having much relevance outside the USA because the plight of carriers there was aggravated by unlimited usage. US carriers objected to carrying the extra traffic generated by the likes of YouTube and BitTorrent and others including Google objected to the carriers' crude attempts to manage traffic by restricting customers' access to such sites.

The issue came to a head in 2008 when the FCC ordered Comcast, a cable TV and Internet access provider, to cease blocking or downgrading certain users' access to some peer-to-peer download services. The FCC's ruling, however, was subsequently struck down on appeal over the FCC's authority to implement net neutrality regulations.

US state of play

The FCC rallied and in December 2010 issued a new policy (still to be tested in a federal court) that sets three basic rules for net neutrality¹:

• Transparency. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their broadband services;
• No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services; and
• No unreasonable discrimination. Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

It is interesting to note that only the first of the FCC's three rules applies equally to fixed and mobiles providers. But for mobiles, the no-blocking rule applies only to services "that compete with their voice or video telephony services” and mobile providers are not mentioned at all in the third rule because "existing mobile networks present operational constraints that fixed broadband networks do not typically encounter. This puts greater pressure on the concept of "reasonable network management" for mobile providers".

But mobiles are under pressure. Free Press wants the FCC to take a close look at Google's move to curtail access (making them "unavailable for download” via the Android Market) to independent tethering apps. Google says it is doing this in response to requests from wireless carriers. But Google's Droid partner Verizon says "Google manages what's available in the Android Market."

When Verizon acquired massive amounts of spectrum in the 700MHz "C Block" auction back in 2008 it promised to adhere to the FCC's "Open Access" rules which forbid carriers from trying to "deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice." In the new Report and Order (Paras 134-135), the FCC has hinted that its powers may not be restricted to users of this part of the spectrum. Again, this must be tested in court.

Dutch policy

The Netherlands has gone further. In April 2011, KPN announced plans to charge mobile customers extra for using Skype and WhatsApp (an application that for $2 pa enables smart phone users to send messages for no additional charge). KPN does not reveal much but last year Telstra's messaging revenues were over $1 billion and over 9 billion SMS were sent from its mobile phones. So, losing voice and message revenues to Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp could seriously dent profitability.

To charge users access to such services, KPN would need to look at the data being transferred, using "deep packet inspection." Following protests about possible privacy violations, politicians moved quickly to stop the plan. In June 2011, the Dutch parliament passed a bill which will force mobile Internet providers to let customers use Skype and other rival services on their networks without charging extra or giving preferential treatment to their own offerings (and not to place cookies without express permission from the end user).²

KPN has responded [Business Week 19 July] saying that from September the cheapest advertised price for one gigabyte of mobile data will be part of a euro50 ($70)/month package, compared with current packages under euro20 ($28) that include unlimited data. This is similar to the moves that US fixed carriers have made by moving towards Australian style monthly caps.

Expect to see mobile handset prices increase and more volume-based charging. The latter makes sense for both fixed and mobile networks and is the next logical move after caps.

¹ FCC (December 2010) Open Internet Rules, Report and Order 10-201.
² http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dutch-parliament-mobile-net-neutrality.html

Written by Henry Lancaster, Senior Analysts at Paul Budde Communication

So I'm quite worried by the push for content fees by European operators. Apparently Vivendi, Deutsche Telecom, and Alcatel-Lucent will release a report pushing this "solution" to concerns about slow deployment of next-generation broadband. It's nothing new, and not unique to Europe, but I see the campaign coalescing in a powerful way. It was strongly in evidence at the OECD High-Level Meeting sessions in Paris that I led two weeks ago. Europe is where broadband competition at the retail level has prevented some of the problems we've had in the U.S. If the carrier, content, and equipment industries worldwide reach a consensus on a new business model for the Internet, we're in trouble.

The freedom of not watching the clock is a very powerful thing. Social science research even suggests that it's a reason why poor people don't do as well in life: they are too busy keeping track of small costs that the rest of us ignore. It's what made possible the rocketship growth of Internet access, mobile phone service, YouTube, Netflix, Gmail, Skype, and countless others. And it doesn't just let the big guys get big; it lets the small guys get started without the high cost of buying in the club. It was written in a different context, but Josh Kopelman hit the nail on the head in a blog post four years ago. A simplistic economic analysis will tell you that metered charges maximize welfare for everyone, but human behavior and creativity don't follow simplistic models.

So, what do we do? Heavy-handed price regulation isn't a solution. Putting carriers in an economic straight-jacket isn't the answer for many reasons, including the predictable ways they will respond. And operators should be free to innovate, manage their networks, and generate returns for their investors like everyone else. Better to achieve an equilibrium like the U.S. Internet backbone market had at key points in time. Competitive alternatives, systemic dependencies, mutually assured destruction, and cultural norms produced a workable interconnection regime without regulatory intervention… usually.

It's easy to point to the old backbone market as an ideal, harder to dig into the details and understand how it really works, and harder still to give the broadband industry the characteristics that produced those positive results. That last one is what regulators should focus on. Alignment of incentives, largely driven by competition, is the only sustainable force to drive corporate behavior. It would be a shame to muzzle the Internet as an engine for growth just when the world economy needs it most.

Written by Kevin Werbach, Professor at the Wharton School and Organizer of the Supernova Conference

This 2 day meeting, "The Internet Economy: Generating Innovation and Growth”, had the objective of exploring a number of current issues in the public policy space, including:

• how best to develop high speed broadband access,
• how to leverage broadband for economic growth,
• metrics of broadband development and its impact, and
• how best to maintain openness and promote continued growth.

The presentations I heard at this meeting could be broadly classified into a number of themes, as outlined below.

Public Policy: The Internet as a brilliant success of Multi-Stakeholderism

The first theme was somewhat self-congratulatory in nature, and noted that the Internet has been very effective in achieving economic growth. One speaker cited from a McKinsey report that the level of economic growth attributable to the Internet in 15 years, as measured by GDP growth, equalled the level of GDP growth experienced in the Industrial Revolution over 50 years.

The speakers who talked to this theme espoused freedom of expression, freedom of governance, and freedom of enterprise — online. The Secretary General of the OCED proposed that the OECD, and its working methods of inclusion of governments, the private sector, civil society and the technical community, was uniquely positioned to further this effort. As he noted in his presentation to this meeting, "The OECD has already established many of the social norms that define the Internet today." He espoused a light touch public policy environment as a platform to provide growth, and a driver of innovation that improves efficiency and growth. In other words, when handled with some consideration and care from a perspective of public policy and governance, the Internet will continue to play the role of a critical enabling tool for wealth creation.

The prevalent meme of today appears to be "multi-skateholderism," which appears to relate to today's mixed environment of public and private sector activity, coupled with explicit recognition of civil society and other vested interests, including the technical sector as stakeholders in the process.

The tone of such presentations on the success of the open Internet and upon light touch public policies and multi-stakeholderism was generally upbeat, with some concessions to the challenges of security and net neutrality, but overall there was a sense that if the process was well structured, then such challenges could be properly addressed to the satisfaction of all.

In many ways this is little more than self-congratulatory rhetoric about the positive outcomes that have resulted from the general deregulation of the telecoms sector in the late 20th century and the associated shift of the model of service in this sector from a single public sector utility telecom operator to a diverse set of competitive private sector actors. However, an implicit subtext within this theme was a critical commentary on alternative approaches to coordination frameworks for national and international communications, notably the ITU-T, and a rather barbed criticism of the ability of such treaty-based institutions to perform the necessary structural changes to their institutional model that would allow the institution to reflect the broader set of stakeholders that are peer players in today's landscape. Perhaps behind the rhetoric is one more piece of preparatory activity in the extended leadup to the renegotiation of the world telecommunications treaty by the set of nation states that have some level of commitment a communications industry structure that is now largely based on private sector activity within a framework of open competition, and a general desire to reduce, to some extent, an indefinite continuance of the encumbrances, obligations, and structural cross-subsidies that are associated with the current treaty obligations that stand behind the ITU-T.

The Faltering of the Traditional Carrier

A number of speakers on the topic of broadband infrastructure were critical of today's network infrastructure. A salient comment I heard at one point was: "This sector really has a problem in meeting demand."

Some of the now-privatised telcos (for example, the presentation from Telecom Italia) were effectively claiming that with the impositions of net neutrality and the imposition of a public policy agenda of ubiquitous equitable access for all to a high speed broadband infrastructure funded through private capital investment was not a viable proposition.

The broader question was raised in a presentation from the Korean delegate, who raised the question as to who should fund broadband network infrastructure construction. The Australian presentation made that case that such large scale broadband infrastructure projects exceeded the capacity of private enterprise, and therefore the responsibility to lead such projects fell to the public sector. Although it has to be noted that this leadership comes at the considerable cost of around $2,000 per capita in the Australian case, and it therefore takes a relatively robust economy to underwrite such a significant level of public capital expenditure within the broader collection of public sector issues. Many other OECD economies appear to have largely left the activity of the construction of broadband network infrastructure to the agenda of the private sector, particularly where financing is concerned, and limited their involvement to cheering from the sidelines. The outcomes so far from such an approach are not exactly stellar.

Another carrier, AT&T, asserted that public communications policy in broadband infrastructure is being driven by a vocal minority rather than the mainstream and asserts that this imbalance in policy formulation will result in subsequent retrograde intervention that will restore what he termed as "20th century regulation." He argued for continuance of deregulation and a "hands-off" policy response by government. He noted that a policy priority of broadband access, at an affordable price, as a enabler of economic outcomes, and a lever to improve delivery of social services and utilities. Interestingly, he noted a $95B infrastructure investment by AT&T over the past 5 years and claimed that this cost could not feasibly be recovered from the end user base because the imposition of additional costs onto the consumer base would exclude large sectors of users from the network, and this would be counter to a an objective of ubiquity of access. Given the stated preference for continuation of an industry model that is a deregulated industry lead by private sector investment, it would appear that AT&T is constructing a case to forego the concept of network neutrality with respect to their carriage services, and they apparently wish to have the ability to impose additional costs on content industry actors if they want to have high speed visibility to users on AT&T's broadband network and recover a significant proportion of their investment in this manner.

Network neutrality is a significant issue in today's industry, and it appears to be used by the carriers and operators as a keyword for their lack of incentive for infrastructure investment beyond the existing cooper loop wired infrastructure, citing that net neutrality acts as an investment disincentive that brings the financial returns on capital investment in infrastructure below what they consider to be acceptable levels that are able to meet the cost of private capital in their enterprises. At the same time they are pointing to the lack of radio spectrum as the reason for a lack of further investment in mobile data infrastructure, and accusing application developers of generating mobile content applications that make extravagant use of bandwidth, and hence extravagant use of spectrum as being part of the problem they face.

With some small level of dissension, there appears to be a general admission that demand on today's Internet is not only outstripping current levels of supply, demand growth now is outstripping the sector's business plans, capital investment capability and even technical capability, and the resultant need to exercise common constraint in an environment of limited resources is counter to an industry whose relatively crude content and service models appear to be based on continued abundance of the basic commodity of bandwidth and ubiquitous connectivity.
Security and Privacy

This is one of those mantra topics - everyone agreed that security is a Good Thing (at least I heard noone argue against the concept!), and all speakers who touched upon this topic appeared to agree with the proposition that this was a current issue and by no means a solved problem. But where to go from here was definitely not so clear.

It was clearly recognised that the quantity, breadth and detail of information that is now online poses some serious concern. The risk profile of unintended information exposure now includes individuals, organisations and even nation states. The security industry is becoming overwhelmed with the onslaught of new threats on a continuing basis, and the underlying concern is that the current level of cyber attack may mutate at any time into attack profiles associated with cyber warfare between nation states.

Industry commentators perceive this topic to have a low priority in the political agenda, where politicians want lower prices and greater regulatory control, while the ability of the private sector to invest in the necessary resources and measures to support greater levels of online security is limited by the relatively low value placed on this activity by end users. In some ways the issue of security in todays networks, particularly as they relate to high end security measures that are capable of defending a national communications system against broad scale infrastructure attack of a scale and intensity anticipated in the context of a concerted and well resourced attack (such as envisaged in a cyber warfare attack, for example), is seen to be beyond the scope of conventional private sector infrastructure operators. At the same time the public sector is showing some signs of uncertainty as to how to engage with this agenda, as this is a matter that is well beyond simple regulatory responses.

Hand-in-hand with security is the topic of privacy. It was asserted that the challenge about privacy is not about technology, as today's technology is adequately capable of supporting privacy, but is about the nexus of privacy policies and technology. In order to implement scalable systems that respect and adhere to privacy policies and are functional, there is a need to invest in an effort to define common privacy and authentication standards, i.e., standards relating to the nature of credentials that appropriately define individuals and roles, reputation mechanisms and validation of such credentials and the associated topic of negotiation of trust. The privacy management reference model is looking at operational privacy management in online services, and public standards need to be considered in the development of services. There is some optimism that policy entropy and conflicting standards can be addressed, assuming that the various actors in the area talk to each other and work in the context of industry-driven standards that are based on interoperable implementations. There is the expectation that the industry can deploy systems that can manage privacy conflict and ensure compliance with public policy frameworks that would engender trust and confidence. It was suggested that governments need to support the effort to foster the greater use of standards organisations to facilitate the development of data privacy standards and their adoption.

IPR and Intermediaries

This is a long-standing issue in this sector. The copyright holders have been reluctant, or incapable, on the whole to modify their business model to adapt to the capabilities of computing systems and computer networks to replicate and redistribute content. In the face of monotonically declining sales revenue of traditional media, and the collapse of many of former major players in the media-based content distribution industry, the content industry resorted to legal means to attempt to curb the decline in their industry.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States is perhaps the most well known, but no means unique, example of this push for legislative remedies to unauthorized redistribution of content, and the industry has, at least in the realm of the public policy debate successfully managed to apply a lexicon that includes emotive terms such as "theft", "illegal", and "piracy" to such redistribution activities and have this lexicon adopted by the broader industry and in public policy debates.

However, such actions have been largely unsuccessful in terms of reducing the level of such unauthorized redistribution of content and the associated revenue leak that such redistribution represents to copyright holders. The copyright industry has now turned its attention to attempts to coerce the carriage providers to act as co-opted vigilantes in the efforts to enforce intellectual property rights.

This effort runs counter to the general principle of the role of a common carrier, where, in somewhat approximate terms, the carrier is bound to respect the privacy of the parties to whom it has contracted to act as a carrier, and in return is not held to be liable for the content carried across its network. However, there is a strong push to have the public sector to force the carriage sector, and all others who act as "intermediaries' in the provision of services and content to users, to play an active role in enforcing the intellectual property rights of copyright holders of the material. Rather than starting from an assumption that carriage providers and intermediaries are not liable for the content they carry on behalf of users, the default position being pushed in the context of this OECD meeting is one of assuming that such liabilities already exist, and the consequent agenda is to "limit" such liabilities.

It has been pointed out by critics of this approach (such as in a recent blog on this topic) that the wording of the communiqué from this meeting that some of the stakeholders, notably the technical community according to this particular critic, acted in a way that played into the hands of the IPR efforts: "Lacking the historical perspective, ITAC failed to see the camels nose being inserted under the tent in the IPR and Intermediary Liability sections."

Some of the presentations at the meeting were staunchly in favour of the copyright industry's proposals for making carriers and ISPs liable for content. In particular the presentation by Vivendi went as far as claiming that the entire content creation industry would come to a complete halt if IPR theft was not halted using all available means. The assertion was made in this context that: "Copyright is a key component of economic growth."

An alternative view was put forward by Deezer (and presumably Pandora, were they to be present) is that "piracy" is just one competing service model for distribution of content, and the real goal of this industry should be to create business and service models for the distribution of content that represent a superior service proposition to users as compared to resorting to unauthorized redistribution of content in the form of "piracy". Such new service models should allow IPR to be respected and due royalties paid in the use of copyright material. From Deezer's reported commercial success, this is evidently an achievable objective.

In any case, the default position of assuming some unspecified level of liability on the part of intermediaries, including carriage providers, and the need to "limit" this liability with respect to copyright material was maintained in the deliberations prior to this meeting, and the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Committee (CSISAC) was unable to endorse the resultant communiqué.

IPv6 - The Elephant in the Room

Oddly enough for a meeting that was intended to discuss the public policy aspects of the internet's future growth and the maintenance of the Internet's openness and ability to innovate, evolve and generate societal wealth through efficient and novel forms of connectivity and communication, the one topic that implicitly threatens the entire framework of today's Internet rated barely a mention in the meeting, namely the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool and the industry's marked indifference to adopt IPv6. It was the unacknowledged elephant in the room.

While one speaker, Vint Cerf, highlighted the need to place IPv6 adoption as a matter of urgent priority in the public policy agenda, and noted that without IPv6, innovation on the Internet will suffer and beneficial outcomes from an open and accessible communications environment would cease, and we simply have no alternatives at this point in time. He noted that if this meeting can conclude with the imperative to deploy IPv6 across all parts of the Internet, then it would be a useful meeting with a positive message. Oddly enough, the chairman's summary at the end of this particular session omitted any reference to IPv6, despite this topic being the major theme of Vint's presentation.

There was certainly an air of disconnection that persisted through the meeting on the continued omission of any mention of IPv4 address exhaustion and the risks posed to the further growth of the Internet if IPv6 is not adopted in a timely manner. It got to the point that when a speaker from the UK Regulatory Office subsequently mentioned IPv6 and the need for the public sector to actively support its adoption, parts of the audience broke out in spontaneous applause.

It appears that despite many years of active promotion of IPv6 the message is still not getting heard within the area of public policy. The comprehensive transition of the Internet to IPv6 is a central pillar of any expectation that the Internet can continue to grow and sustain a vibrant environment based on open competition and innovation. So far we appear to have failed to effectively make that case that in a networked environment that stalls on IPv6 the resultant NAT and ALG-ridden IPv4 environment is one where the current incumbents will hold all the addresses and any further competitive entry into the Internet by new actors, at both the levels of carriage and content services, would be effectively limited to the terms and conditions imposed by the incumbents. Such a scenario is about as good a definition of the failure of an open market as one could find, and its one that the Internet would do very well to avoid.

Where To From Here?

Somehow I'm missing the sense of driving optimism and opportunity that was associated with the 2008 OECD Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy. It's not clear to me that multi-stakeholderism is sufficiently powerful a mantra to shake off the issues that confront this industry as it slowly shifts into a phase of success-disaster.

Yes, the mobile market is a massive commercial success, so much so that we are now running out of useable spectrum space in the most populous parts of the networked world.

Yes, the wired internet is transforming our economies, so much so that the pressure to recable our infrastructure from copper to fibre is now an essential prerequisite to keeping pace with demand, but the capital is not there and the sustainable carrier business models are not there to undertake this effort.

Yes, the provision of content is a runaway success, but the copyright industry still cries foul and in an effort to curb some of the reported massive damage being inflicted to the entertainment industry there is an effort to rip apart the principle of common carrier and hold all elements of this industry liable for the unauthorised distribution of content.

And yes, we've managed to distribute billions of computers, but at the same time we've managed to create significant areas of vulnerability, and we are now witnessing the exploitation of these weaknesses shift from elements of organised crime to the distinct possibility of cyber warfare waged between nation states.

But I don't believe that any of these issues present insurmountable challenges. In seeking productive responses to these challenges we need to make sure that we are looking in the right place. These problems appear to arise from an intersection of rapid shift in the technology base of this industry intersecting a set of business and policy frameworks that are often somewhat conservative in their response to change. I would like to believe that many of the answers we are looking for lie in adaptation of business models and public policy frameworks, and the tools that will best assist this common effort are probably economic in nature.

For that reason I believe that the OECD has a valuable role in the coming months and years, and I am heartened to see the OECD continue to engage all stakeholders in a public dialogue that I hope will be ultimately fruitful and productive for the future of the Internet.

Written by Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC

Read full story: External Source

For those of you coming in person, we look forward to seeing you! For the rest of you here are the remote participation details:

• Webcast:
• Transcription
• Questions

There is no need to register for remote participants — all are welcome. For those unfamiliar with backchann.nl, one can not only ask questions but also vote on questions already asked. There are chatrooms associated with both the transcription and the webcast. For those wishing to comment via twitter the hashtag is #INETny

Here'a brief schedule (times are EDT = UTC-4):

09:00 Opening remarks
09:30 Keynote + Q&A: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
10:30 Panel: Pushing technology boundaries
12:00 Lunch
13.00 Keynote + Q&A: Vint Cerf
13:30 Panel: People Power
15:00 Keynote: Lawrence E. Strickling
15:20 Panel: New Privacy Models
16:30 Closing discussion
17:30 End

The full agenda is on bit.ly/inetnyagenda

More info: isoc.org/nyinet

Written by Joly MacFie, VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY

A number of European regulators and governments are now making forthright statements defending the principal. This month, EU member states must transpose into national laws the revised New Regulatory Framework: this revision of the five directives (dating to 2002) was adopted to answer issues created by increased competition in the telecoms sector, in conjunction with the development of new technologies. It was supplemented by the EC's declaration of net neutrality, and specifically by calls for laws which guarantee an open and neutral internet. Indeed the newly established Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) is tasked with ensuring that national regulators abide by these directives, as also the net neutrality principal. Since its creation, BEREC has reported several breaches of net neutrality, particularly the blocking of mobile VoIP.

A number of mobile operators have tried to introduce charging models for content which in some way bypasses their SMS and voice services. Telefónica is among them, having threatened to charge search engines for using its network. T-Mobile in Germany and in other markets has blocked Skype (though other MNOs, notably H3 in the UK, have enveloped Skype within their offerings), and TeliaSonera recently announced that it would not permit VoIP services on its fast growing LTE networks across Scandinavia and the Baltics: it already bans the use of VoIP from its cheaper contract plans.

KPN has similarly announced plans to charge new customers for services such as Skype and WhatsApp (which compete with its own services), and for access to Facebook, YouTube and other sites. Deep packet inspection technologies would ensure that customers do not access the 'value-added' sites without paying a premium first. In some respects the plan may be an attempt to ease worries among investors following a poor financial performance for the first quarter of the year: the company reported a 1.3% fall in revenue and a 4.1% fall in EBITDA, year-on-year. In explaining the 8.1% fall in EBITDA in the Mobile International division, KPN implicated customers using a range of apps which caused a fall in SMS and voice usage, and so reduced revenue and profit.

As for regulators, there is some inconsistency. The Norwegians were among the first to defend net neutrality, as early as 2007. It recognises that banning mobile VoIP is less due to concerns over network capacity (mobile VoIP is not bandwidth hungry) than to protect operators' own voice services, and revenue, from competition. KPN initially had the blessing of the Dutch regulator, OPTA, on the basis that the company would not block sites as such but would simply adopt a different charging model for services carried. Yet KPN may be forced to change its proposed surcharges: the States-General recently amended the country's telecommunications law to guarantee net neutrality in both fixed and mobile networks, and so prevent operators from surcharging for such services. The amendment was tabled by the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, and was supported by a coalition of political parties.

On the EU level, the EC is sticking to the guidelines of the revised NRF: that ISPs are to be transparent about their traffic control measures, and be honest about advertised connection speeds. There is no ban on traffic shaping measures, such as bandwidth throttling or limiting certain kinds of traffic, as long as ISPs meet minimum levels of service and do not obstruct customers churning to other providers.

Meanwhile the Council of Europe (a separate entity from the EU, and which acts on behalf of 47 member countries), has produced draft principles on internet governance which assert that ISPs should not prioritise content from companies that have paid them, or charge extra for content from particular providers.

As has become habitual with mobile operators, their own failings — partly through lack of investment in improved offerings, combined with a reluctance to allow customers to use more fully the networks they are upgrading — are leading them to adopt policies which run counter to customer interests. In consequence, we should expect many more governments to enforce net neutrality through legislation.

Written by Henry Lancaster, Senior Analysts at Paul Budde Communication

To understand what's happening, you need to understand the Internet's business model and you need to know something about peering as it works in the real world.

The most succinct definition of the Internet I'm aware of is: Internet (n.) A voluntary agreement among network operators to exchange traffic for their mutual benefit.

This is very different from the telephone networks (fixed or mobile) where relations between operators are governed by laws and regulations, change at a regulatory pace, i.e. decades, and are continuously gamed by political processes.

Each Internet operator needs to be able to reach all possible Internet addresses, so interconnection is essential. If you are a small operator, like netBlazr, you purchase "Internet transit" services from a larger operator. Rates are volume dependent and arrangements are similar to those of any other business or individual purchasing an Internet access service. If you are a large operator, a large content provider or a very large business, then interconnection costs and arrangements become negotiable. Two operators in Holland will likely agree to exchange that portion of their respective traffic that is destined for each other's networks at the AMS-IX which is local, rather than pay for Internet transit services that would likely carry that traffic to London or the US where a higher tier operator would handle the exchange. Thus the two Dutch operators engage in peering for that portion of their traffic for which it makes sense.

This pattern is repeated throughout the Internet as each operator evaluates where, how, and with whom it makes sense to exchange portions of their traffic so as to minimize costs, increase performance or achieve other goals important to that operator. Thus there are vastly more interconnection contracts, formed under more diverse terms, for the Internet than ever was the case for the telephone network. Further, this network of agreements is in constant flux as individual operators find better deals.

It's instructive to follow the growth of YouTube from their founding through their acquisition by Google. When YouTube began, they had to pay standard rates for Internet access. As they grew to be a significant content source, their cost of Internet access fell as more and more operators asked to peer with them, as I discussed two years ago.

So between Google and France Telecom, who has negotiating leverage? and why?

France Telecom already has peering agreements with multiple other Internet backbones, so their customers have several paths to get to Google content. Why would either party want to connect directly?

First, it might cut costs. Whatever pre-agreement path the traffic takes involves some cost. Perhaps that's money paid to other operators or it may just be the cost of maintaining the facilities needed for the pre-agreement traffic (e.g. to go via London). I can't guess the specifics for Google or for France Telecom, but each has a possible interest here.

Second, it will likely improve performance. Even shaving 50 milliseconds off of round trip times (RTT) can improve user experience as accessing a single web page can require the exchange of dozens of messages, thus 50 ms less RTT can shave more than a second off the page load time. In a competitive market, France Telecom might want to advertise their network as the "fastest," but local access competition is not that great in France (or in many markets, like the US). France Telecom has nearly 50% market share. They are losing ground to Free, but apparently it's not enough to justify a marketing campaign based on the "fastest" network. Google on the other hand, has a strong reason to want better user experiences. In Google experiments with search latency, longer latencies reduce the number of searches a user does per day. Given the number of Google search users on the France Telecom network, Google can directly compute their monetary return from cutting search latency by X ms. So Google's negotiators have hard numbers in their back pocket when they go to talk with France Telecom.

Is this good or bad? Well, if France Telecom doesn't have to compete on the performance of their service, that suggests a failure of competition policy. But then a solution should address competition in the French Internet access market, not government regulation of peering or the imposition of "network neutrality" regulations on operators that don't have a monopoly position.

For myself, I look forward to continued growth of new providers in France, like Free, as I discussed in the January issue of NGN Magazine.

Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at netBlazr

The CRTC decision allows large Internet providers such as BCE Inc's Bell Canada to charge smaller providers who lease space on their networks on a per-byte, or usage, basis. The CRTC is independent but cabinet has the power to amend or rescind its rulings. The government's threatened intervention is an unwelcome development for major Internet providers, which have fought for years for the CRTC ruling that effectively ends "unlimited" Internet download plans.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

In his State of the Union address President Obama set the goal of enabling businesses to provide high-speed wireless services to at least 98% of all Americans within five years. To pay for this the government hopes to raise nearly $28 billion from spectrum auctions.

Key elements of the policy are:

• Nearly double wireless spectrum available for mobile broadband
• Provide at least 98% of Americans with access to 4G high-speed wireless
• Catalyse innovation through a wireless innovation (WIN)
• Develop and deploy a nationwide, interoperable wireless network for Public Safety
• Cut the deficit by $9.6 billion over the next decade (surplus spectrum auction revenue).

When the President was elected in November 2008 the plans that we discussed with the White House were far more ambitious and the American National Broadband Plan talked about an FttH network for a range of trans-sector (national purpose) services. However a dysfunctional Congress, heavily lobbied by the incumbent players, made it impossible for the President to follow that road. With that, the policy quickly moved in the direction of wireless, since the FCC does have control over spectrum and can initiate that process without the explicit approval of Congress.

But a nationwide wireless network will never be able to provide the same capacity as an FttH network, so it will not be possible to use this for sophisticated high-quality healthcare, education — or for entertainment services. Furthermore, one could argue against government intervention here as the new 4G networks will be built by the current mobile operators anyway.

At the moment the 98% of Americans targeted by Obama's plan are already linked to 3G networks; and the natural upgrade to 4G is just around the corner. The only difference will be that the operators now have the possibility of getting a significant amount of the $18 billion from the government to pursue their commercial interest. There is nothing in the plan that would see a change to the current situation, where both Congress and the FCC are captives of the incumbent players — companies whose sole aim is to preserve their vertically-integrated business models.

By comparison, the National Broadband Plan in Australia will deliver FttH to 93% of the population and only 7% will be connected to wireless infrastructure for that purpose. Similar to the USA, Australians also are already connected to wireless broadband networks, which operate parallel to the national fixed broadband infrastructure.

Another worrying factor is that net neutrality does not apply to wireless networks in the USA, so operators can discriminate against certain content and/or content providers to suit their own commercial needs. This will make many of the services that require capacity and quality very expensive, unaffordable for most. In America there is absolutely no guarantee of an open Internet approach over wireless networks. This will lead to closed, purposed-based broadband services, where throttling speeds will become the norm and prices will stay high.

Furthermore, in order to reap the $28 billion that the government aims to collect in spectrum fees it will have to provide attractive licences to the industry — to organisations that are focused on maximising their profits — and that means that there will be less room for an effective national purpose policy (for example, the use of wireless broadband infrastructure by government authorities, utilities and other public utilities-based not-for-profit services will simply be too expensive).

Obama's plan also requires the cooperation of broadcasters, who will have to vacate spectrum. They have already indicated that they are not overly enthusiastic about this and it could delay the process, and potentially increase the costs, as the broadcasters will demand significant compensation, since they will not only have to give up spectrum but will also face competition from these new wireless broadband networks.

In addition, the highly siloed, splintered and divided Public Safety sector has indicated that it has problems with the prospect of sharing a wireless network with other (commercial) operators; so here also significant problems lie ahead.

As we have indicated previously, national broadband plans that are aimed at nation-building and serving the national purpose can only be developed once structural changes have been made to the underlying industry. The country needs to focus on the benefits that will result from open broadband infrastructure as an enabler in transforming the economy and the society. These benefits largely fall outside the balance sheets of the telcos, so why would they bother?

Also, without fundamental industry changes the spectrum — which is basically a public resource — will be exploited for commercial purposes and the whole plan will further add to high usage prices for the public who owns it.

Unfortunately it has become clear over the last two years that the President will not be able to instigate such fundamental changes and the most likely outcome, therefore, will be more of the same old operators, a lengthy legislative process and very little innovation.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Read full story: Washington Post

Older frames typically use hyperbole to justify government intervention or forbearance. Network Neutrality advocates frame the matter as impacting the Internet's openness and its ability to incubate new ventures such as Google, Netflix, Amazon and EBay. Opponents reject the need for government safeguards based on the view that there is no problem requiring a solution.

Everyone seems to have ignored a more basic question whether or not the Internet access market currently operates competitively. If the market is sufficiently competitive one can vote with their dollars and change carriers if and when the carrier operates in ways subscribers do not like. Of course there are transaction costs in making such a move, and in the wireless market carriers offer subsidized handsets to lock in subscribers for two years. As well the matter of identifying the cause of network congestion, sluggish service or discriminatory practices presents a forensic problem. In light of the interconnected and integrated nature of the Internet, where content and conduit converge, an end user cannot readily determine if degradation in service — however defined — is caused by the content or application provider, a long haul carrier, or the ISP providing first and last mile access to the Internet cloud.

Still if the Internet access marketplace operates competitively, then consumers, if so inclined, can reward or punish ISPs based on the real or perceived openness. Even in competitive markets, carriers can agree explicitly or decide unilaterally not to emphasize or market different degrees of openness. But at least the potential exists for an ISP to identify the openness factor and target consumers who consider it a priority. This is not happening in the Internet access marketplace either because openness, transparency and nondiscrimination are non-issues, because all ISPs are fair and neutral, or because consumers do not have the ability to identify and subscriber to an ISP promising fair and neutral service should the existing carrier explicitly or subversively operate in a non-neutral manner.

So competition in the Internet access marketplace matters greatly and somehow this issue constitutes a "huge omission" in the debate according to the fair minded writers at The Economist. See: A tangled web, America's new internet rules are mostly sensible — but the country's real web problem is far more basic (Dec. 29, 2010) If I had access to a competitive marketplace ISPs would have offer me something better than the one (and only one viable) option I have now: $59.95 plus tax and fees for downloads up to 15Mbps, and uploads up to 3Mbps, or $40.95 plus tax and fees for up to 1.5 Mbps download and uploads up to 384 Kbps.

Just because many consumers have a choice of two broadband distribution platforms (cable and DSL) does not by definition ensure robust competition with affordable rates. The Economist dares to report the issue frame ignored by the FCC and others:

"[T]he failure in America to tackle the underlying lack of competition in the provision of internet access. In other rich countries it would not matter if some operators blocked some sites: consumers could switch to a rival provider. That is because the big telecoms firms with wires into people's homes have to offer access to their networks on a wholesale basis, ensuring vigorous competition between dozens of providers, with lower prices and faster connections than are available in America. Getting America's phone and cable companies to open up their networks to others would be a lot harder for politicians than prattling on about neutrality; but it would do far more to open up the net."

Written by Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair and Professor of Telecommunications and Law

I gathered together a team of international experts to assist in writing these reports.

I was able to do this because the revolutionary plans of the Australian government in relation to the NBN very much appealed to the Obama Team.

My contact in the White House was Professor Susan Crawford. She was the personal advisor to President Obama on technology. We made incredible progress and had the backing not only of the President, but also of the FCC and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) which is part of the Department of Commerce.

With such support we were convinced that the plans we produced had a good chance of being implemented by the new Administration. However, by mid-2009 the role of the Transition Team had become more difficult, as the telecoms lobby had been able to infiltrate Congress and created 'Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt' in relation to any changes to telecom policy. With hindsight we can now see that the President unfortunately missed the opportunity to put his leadership stamp on these processes in the early days of his Administration (and not just in relation to telecoms).

In June 2009 I visited Susan Crawford in the White House, and by that time she had been labelled a communist by Fox News, and was being accused of wanting to nationalise the Internet. This, of course, was complete nonsense, but it is difficult to take on Fox News, it being heavily supported by the vested interests in that country.

The National Broadband Plan that was produced by the FCC was a watered-down version of what we had been proposing; nevertheless we saw it as a good start. However this plan received a similar hostile reception from Congress.

During this period I also learned that the three major telcos in the United States (Verizon, AT&T and Comcast — which are known as ISPs, not as telcos) are spending some $100 million a year on lobbying activities. This process had been finetuned under the Bush Administration (and, again, this is not unique to telecoms).

The way it typically works is that a large team of lobbyists is deployed to visit every single member of Congress and every Senator in the country. In each of the electorates certain projects are launched. This might involve employing extra people in a local technical telecom unit or the opening of a local support office, or the provision of some extra free telecoms services to a school or hospital, and so on — basically everyone receives something from those with a vested interest.

And, of course, these projects are heavily supported by PR machines and the politicians get great photo opportunities to show what they have been able to achieve for their communities.

But if certain policies are subsequently proposed that could affect the vested interests the lobbyists go back to the politicians, saying that if the policies are ratified offices could be closed, projects terminated, etc.

However, that is not all.

Again during the Bush years, and even before that time, the vested interests have had an enormous influence within the FCC — to such an extent that it has sometimes been suggested that legislation had actually been written by them. Yet again, this is not unique to telecoms; this issue was recently addressed in the movie Inside Job in relation to the banking industry.

The incredible power of the vested interests is practically incomprehensible to people outside the USA (or at least to those in other democratic countries). In the early 2000s they were basically able to prevent the introduction of broadband wholesale and services such as local loop unbundling and line sharing as regulated services.

As a result the status of broadband competition in the USA is among the lowest in the western world.

Furthermore, broadband access and the Internet as a content service has been rolled into one access policy, thus giving the ISPs (read Verizon, AT&T and Comcast) the ability to monopolise the content side. This has been identified as the network neutrality issue. Every other developed country has separated regulated network access from content and so network neutrality is nowhere near as serious an issue elsewhere as it is in the USA.

I have to acknowledge that many of my American colleagues who contributed to the reports had been sceptical as to what the future might hold — ever since Obama, in his first 100 days in office, failed to show leadership. This left the door wide open to the results that are now emerging in the USA.

In a recent presentation Susan Crawford has provided further insights into the incredibly convoluted processes that have led to this plutocracy in the USA.

In discussion with my American colleagues I have often used the example of Telstra. In 1997 the Australian coalition government moved in a similar direction, through its 'self regulation' policy; guess who did win this unequal game?

This led to the situation in which, a decade later, Telstra believed that it was so powerful it could defy the government. This generated one of the most dramatic interventions ever to take place in the telecoms industry. It did, however, bring Telstra back into line and saw the company make a 180-degree change in its behaviour.

As a matter of fact, in her presentation Susan refers several times to the Australian situation…

What has already happened in Chattanooga and in other municipalities in America, where the local government and often the local independent electrical utility, has given up on the ability of the private telecommunications sector to provide any useful infrastructure, is now going to happen at the level of the entire Australian continent. What is happening in Australia, given the size of the commitment, is a fundamental paradigm shift that will affect telecom policy around the world.

She comes to a depressing conclusion…

All the people possessing relevant data on the telecoms market are outside the regulator. We don't have actual pricing data inside the FCC that would tell us what the story really is. Wall Street's positions on telecommunications policy have become the conventional wisdom in Washington. They are the accepted way of thinking. Consequently, the leadership shown in Australia seems unthinkable here.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Advocates of net neutrality professed deep disappointment that the FCC's rules weren't more proscriptive and severe. Free Press called the order "fake net neutrality," Public Knowledge said it "fell far short," Media Access Project called it "inadequate and riddled with loopholes," and New America Foundation accused the FCC of "caving to telecom lobbyists." These were their official statements to the press; their Tweets were even harsher.

Free marketers were almost as angry: Cato denounced the order as "speech control," Washington Policy Center said it "fundamentally changes many aspects of the infrastructure of the Internet," and the Reason Foundation said it will lead to "quagmire after quagmire of technicalities, which as they add up will have a toll on investment, service and development."

Republican Congressional leaders made no secret of their displeasure with the FCC's disregard for their will: Rep. Fred Upton (R, Michigan,) the incoming Commerce Committee Chairman called it a "hostile action against innovation that can't be allowed to stand," Rep. Greg Walden (R, Oregon,) incoming Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology called it a "power grab," and vowed to hold hearings to overturn it, while Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R, Texas,) Ranking Member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee said the order "threatens the future economic growth of the Internet." Setting Internet policy is indeed a Congressional prerogative rather than an agency matter, so the longer-term solution must come from the Hill, and sooner would be better than later.

Contrary to this criticism and to snarky blogger claims, not everyone was upset with the FCC's action, coming as it did after a year-long proceeding on Internet regulation meant to fulfill an Obama campaign pledge to advance net neutrality. The President himself declared the FCC action an important part of his strategy to "advance American innovation, economic growth, and job creation," and Senator John Kerry (D, Massachusetts) applauded the FCC for reaching consensus.

Technology industry reaction ranged from positive to resigned: Information Technology Industry Council President and CEO Dean Garfield declared the measure "ensures continued innovation and investment in the Internet," TechNet supported it, and National Cable and Telecommunications Association head Kyle McSlarrow said it could have been much worse. At the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, we were pleased by the promises of a relatively humble set of the rules, less so with the final details; we remain encouraged by the robust process the FCC intends to create for judging complaints, one that puts technical people on the front lines. In the end, the order got the support of the only majority that counts, three FCC commissioners.

Most of us who reacted favorably acknowledged the FCC's order wasn't exactly as we would have written it, but accepted it as a pragmatic political compromise that produces more positives than negatives. The hoped-for closing of the raucous debate will have immense benefits on its own, as simply bringing this distracting chapter in the Internet's story to an end will allow more time for sober discussion about the directions we'd like the Internet to take in its future development. There is no shortage of policy issues that have been cramped by the tendency to view net neutrality as the one great magic wand with the power to solve all the Internet's problems: The FCC has work to do on freeing up spectrum for mobile networking, the Universal Service Fund needs to be reformed, and the National Broadband Plan needs to be implemented.

If the FCC's approach proves sound, it might well be exported to other countries, forming the basis of a consistent international approach to the oversight of an international network developed on consistent standards of its own. Such an outcome would have positive consequences for the Internet standards community, which has its own backlog of unfinished business such as scalable routing, congestion management, security, and the domestication of peer-to-peer file sharing and content delivery networks to resolve. This outcome is far from inevitable; last minute rule changes make it less likely than it might have been.

The most important thing the FCC can do in implementing its system of Internet oversight is to elevate process over proscriptive rules. The traditional approach to telecom regulation is to develop a thick sheath of regulations that govern everything from the insignias on the telephone repair person's uniform to the colors of the insulators on RJ11 cables and apply them in top-down, command-and-control fashion. Many of those on the pro-net neutrality side are steeped in telecom tradition, and they expected such an approach from the FCC for the Internet; theirs are the angry reactions.

But the Internet isn't a telecom network, and a foot-high stack of regulations certainly would produce the negative consequences for innovation and progress the FCC's critics have forecast. The appropriate way to address Internet regulation as to follow the model that the Internet has developed for itself, based on a small number of abstract but meaningful principles (each of which is subject to change for good reason) applied by a broad-based community of experts in a collaborative, consultative setting. Internet standards are not devised in an adversarial setting populated by angels and devils locked into mortal combat; they come from a process that values "rough consensus and running code."

The specifics of the FCC's order nevertheless give pause to those well-schooled in networking. A few hours before the Commission's vote, Commissioner Copps persuaded Chairman Genachowski to reverse the Waxman Bill's presumption regarding the premium transport services that enable Internet TV and video conferencing to enjoy the same level of quality as cable TV. Where the early drafts permitted these services as long as they were offered for sale on a non-discriminatory basis, the final rule arbitrarily presumes them harmful.

The order makes hash of the relationship of the content accelerators provided by Akamai and others to the presumptively impermissible communication accelerators that ISPs might provide one day in order to enable HD group video conferencing and similar emerging applications. The Commission majority fears that allowing network operators to offer premium transport to leading edge apps will put the squeeze on generic transport, but fails to consider that such potential downsides of well-accepted technical practices for Quality of Service can be prevented by applying a simple quota limit on the percentage of a pipe that can be sold as "premium." This fact, which is obvious to skilled protocol engineers, goes unmentioned in the order.

The poor reasoning for this rule casts doubt on the FCC's ability to enforce it effectively without outside expertise. By rejecting Internet standards such as RFC 2475 and IEEE standards such as 802.1Q that don't conform to the telecom activists' nostalgic, "all packets are equal" vision of the Internet, the FCC chose to blind itself to one of the central points in Tim Wu's "Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” paper that started the fight: A neutral Internet favors content applications, as a class, over communication applications and is therefore not truly an open network. The only way to make a network neutral among all applications is to differentiate loss and delay among applications; preferably, this is done by user-controlled means. That's not always possible, so other means are sometimes necessary as well.

All in all, the Commission has built a stone too heavy for it to lift all by itself. The rules have just enough flexibility that the outside technical advisory groups that will examine complaints may be able to correct the order's errors, but to be effective, the advisors need much deeper technical knowledge than the FCC staffers who wrote the order can provide.

It's difficult to ask the FCC — an institution with its own 75 year tradition in which it has served as the battleground for bitter disputes between monopolists and public interest warriors — to turn on a dime and embrace a new spirit of collaboration, but without such a far-reaching institutional transformation its Internet regulation project will not be successful. Those of us who work with the FCC are required to take a leap of faith to the effect that the Commission is committed to transforming itself from a hidebound analog regulator into a digital age shepherd of innovation. Now that the Open Internet Report & Order has passed, we have no choice but to put our shoulders to the rock to help push it along. There's no turning back now.

(This article was originally published on Innovation Policy Blog)

Written by Richard Bennett, Senior Research Fellow

Then the full story came out. This was a peering dispute. In peering agreements, two ISPs exchange traffic without paying each other, on the assumption that both parties have roughly balanced traffic and benefit equally from the interconnection. When there is no balance - that is, when ISP A reaps more benefit from the interconnection than ISP B - it is common practice for ISP A to pay ISP B for the service. These interconnection agreements are embodied in privately negotiated contracts and accordingly the market for internet interconnections is pretty robust and flexible. At least, it looks that way to anyone familiar with the 30-odd years of interminable, costly regulatory disputes over telephone interconnection arrangements. By winning the Netflix bid, Level 3 assumed the status of a content distribution network and increased the amount of traffic it would be pumping through Comcast. CDNs typically pay ISPs for carriage rather than peering.

Faced with this information, some NN advocates responded appropriately. Public Knowledge quickly retreated to an appeal for transparency, in effect admitting that "we don't really know what's going on and we wish the FCC would use its authority to find out." Free Press on the other hand has kept in place a rather strident news release saying ""This is just a preview of what a media monopoly will look like in the Internet age — one company, consolidating its media power to squash competitors, stifle innovation and price-gouge consumers."

Both Free Press and PK have done an outstanding job of fighting for the autonomy and freedom of internet users. But their approach to NN has always been saddled with two problems.

Problem one is the pitfall of "bandwidth egalitarianism," i.e., the crazy idea that bandwidth is not a scarce resource that must inevitably be rationed or managed in some ways, including the price system. As we have argued before, net neutrality concerns should never be confused with bandwidth egalitarianism; the bad thing is not "charging for bandwidth" or "tiering" per se, but anti-competitive discrimination and whether the network intermediary uses its market power over access to exert vertical leverage over content, services and applications.

Problem 2 is the idea that public interest regulation is inherently good and can fix anything and everything that ever goes wrong. Increasingly, advocates of net neutrality have pegged their case to a larger and more powerful role for FCC regulation in the internet industry. And thus the net neutrality debate, instead of focusing on developing new institutional arrangements to preserve internet freedom on BOTH the demand and supply side, descends into a replay of the early 1980s, Reagan-era punch and judy show between democrats and republicans, with one arguing for "more government" and the other for "less government." Neither talking much sense about what the government should actually do. While we believe that there should be rules securing end user rights regarding access to internet content, services and applications, we think it is a mistake to equate this with "more FCC regulation" — just as it is a gross oversimplification to equate a complete absence of rules regarding net neutrality with "more freedom."

There is an important lesson to be drawn from this episode about how to pursue - and not to pursue - the goals of Internet freedom associated with net neutrality. The Level 3 maneuver is a good example of what can and will happen with an over-regulated internet: one business interest complains about another about a commercial negotiation and attempts to bring in the feds simply to get a better business deal. Opening up these contractual arrangements to political mediation is a slippery slope. The scope of regulation - and the costs of participating in the industry - steadily rise as more and more aspects of the industry are sucked into this vortex.

In the current political climate, if net neutrality is framed as "more regulation" and anti-net neutrality is framed as "less regulation" who d'ya think will win? And if NN advocates allow themselves to be snookered into being pawns in a bargaining game between telecom giants, who wins from that?

Written by Milton Mueller, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies