[CAnet - news] Was the Internet ever neutral?

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[Here is an interesting paper on the ongoing debate of network neutrality.
For the most part I agree with the author, but since he is senior legal
regulatory counsel for one of Canada's major telephone companies, one
wonders as with any good lawyer, if he could make an equally compelling
argument on behalf of network neutrality if his client was Google instead of
Telus?  In my personal opinion, network neutrality is essential, but it
should evolve from the marketplace, rather than through regulation. The
debate on Internet neutrality is analogous to the retail market place - most
consumers (at least in North America) prefer the "walled garden" of shopping
malls as opposed to hurly burly of the open (albeit "neutral") street
bazaar. The essential thing is to make sure that they at least have a choice
of shopping malls rather than dictating equal access for merchants in the
street bazaar. As such I believe an important area of future Internet
research is to develop network architectures and business models that are
"inherently" network neutral.  Thanks to Frank A. Coluccio for this pointer
-- BSA]


http://web.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2006/593/mctaggart-tprc06rev.pdf#search=
%22was%20the%20internet%20ever%20fair%20mctaggart%22

http://tinyurl.com/ombeo


Abstract
A new net neutrality rule cannot be justified as simply a codification of
"the way the Internet has always been." If the Internet was ever
predominantly 'neutral,'it was at a time when the public was not allowed to
use it. Since then, the requirements of Internet users have necessitated
changes to many aspects of the Internet's design and operation, with many of
those changes requiring divergence from the Internet's early customs and
architecture. The examples of non-neutrality explored in this paper -
preferential content arrangements, distributed computing, filtering and
blocking to control network abuse, differential interconnection and
interconnectivity, and the impact of resource intensive applications and
users - demonstrate that the Internet and its use are far from neutral or
egalitarian. Those advocates who would like to see the Internet forced into
the mould of a regulated public utility bear the heavy onus of justifying
rejection of competitive market outcomes in favour of a stylized vision of
public internetworking that prohibits or reduces the incentives for
innovation within the network itself. The types of uses to which users are
increasingly putting the Internet, as well as the subject-matter of current
architectural research, suggest that the incongruity of a net neutrality
rule with the interests of mainstream Internet users will only continue to
grow. Instead of trying to prejudge what kinds of data service offerings
consumers will find attractive in the future, the user-driven evolution of
the Internet should be allowed to continue.



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skype: pocketpro
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