Rich Fiscus
7 Sep 2007 5:25
The US Justice Department suddenly feels the need to weigh in on the net neutrality debate. In short, they're against it.
In comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commision in that agency's official discussions, the DoJ said net neutrality "could deter broadband Internet providers from upgrading and expanding their networks to reach more Americans." This raises many questions, not the least of which is whether this is a false crisis caused by greedy ISPs marketing their networks beyond capacity.
As broadband connections become the norm among residential broadband customers, those customers want to make use of applications like Streaming video - the same applications broadband internet providers use as selling points. But the fact is many ISPs don't have enough available throughput to handle a large percentage of their customers streaming reasonable qualtiy video. Another fact is that most people are paying for a maximum speed that their connection may not actually achieve.
In order for large scale consumption of high quality video and audio to become a reality it's fair to assess whether existing internet connections are capable of handling it. It's also fair to ask what needs to be done to get the network ready. But painting ISP's as victims of greedy internet companies is simply ludicrous.
If you download a video from some website, they've already paid for enough bandwidth to transport that video to the internet backbone. At your end, your ISP must also provide that amount of bandwidth. If you aren't paying enough for your ISP to provide that bandwidth it's not because the online store you purchased from didn't pay enough. It's because your ISP has built a network that's not designed to handle that kind of throughput.
If they can't provide it for what you're paying them, they should come clean with their customers and say "we need to charge you more." instead they, and apparently the DoJ, prefer to complain about online retailers who are assumed to have the money to pay for it. But of course in the end that cost will be passed on to their customers.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to charge customers more for using more bandwidth, but that doesn't require singling out specific web services or online merchants to blame. In the end, would it be that hard to just be honest to consumers and sell them a plan that gives them what they think they're paying for?
Sources:
Reuters
The Register