PolicyBlog

"First, it is a competitive service, not a natural monopoly service. " It's only competitive because your company cannot make any money from it when the service is a wonderful utility, and customer service world class. "Second, users have choice of access providers." See users with no other "apples to apples" choice comparisons, or those who have more than standard two natural monopolies, the Telegraph/Telephone and Broadcast Cable TV companies, with Broadcast Satellite being laughable for 2 way human consumption due to latency. "Third, utilities are based on single-use-facility economics. " why should you care, it's a dump pipe put into the ground by someone you contracted out for the original installation. "Fourth, utilities deliver uniform units, whereas broadband delivers completely variable units. " "Whereas electricity, water, and gas are all uniform transmissions, broadband bandwidth is inherently variable requiring network management." Packets are all travel at the same rate of speed of the medium, and there is limits to their size, MTU. While I cannot stand to have a leaky faucet, I do not fear that the unplugged Ethernet jack in the corner surely isn't spilling bits. Concerns of congestion or having to manage a network? Well maybe you should concern your selves with making those big dumb pipes work better for you, and not over subscribe them. Did someone say Natural Gas Shortage??! Or Brownout? "Fifth, utilities are inherently "dumb" networks, while broadband networks are inherently "smart" networks. " See Four. Walk out to your nearest high voltage line transformer, high pressure gas main, or Oil line, and look for the electronics, then for the neighboring fiber optic bundle markers. Being inherently smarter doesn't mean you should charge us for you to mismanage your network capacities, and force your competition pricing on us. "Sixth, utilities are characterized by standard uniformity and glacial rates of change." Really? Did "The Day After Tomorrow" movie affect or help us that much? "In contrast, competitive broadband facilities are characterized by diversity, differentiation, and innovation because they operate in a continuously-changing competitive environment. * While utilities seldom innovate, competitive broadband providers must constantly innovate and promote "smart" network innovation: i.e. ever increasing compression " The only innovation here is how well you can do to change the product name of a technical specification to fool the masses into thinking your their special prom date to spend abundant amounts of money on. "Lastly, and maybe most importantly, current law, policy and precedent have already politically, regulatorily and legally decided that broadband is not and should not be a public utility." Can I see not being an idiot for $1000, Alex? Learn to Spell Guy... the word is "regulatively" and if The Day After Tomorrow the law and policy did change, those who did not originally treat the Internet as a utility will FAIL. Which is a reason I'm sure will be used at some point, because "Too big to Fail" seems to be popular. You cannot add that Franchise Fee and City Tax when that bill arrives. P.S. Please don't follow policy guys who cannot spell privacy on every page of their blog. http://www.flickr.com/photos/playerx/3854572580/

While I am not an advocate for government price controls on internet service at present, the "network management" arguments put forth by Scott Cleland are fallacious. Broadband capacity is exactly, that, capacity. It is the "good" that people want, not some "network manager" deciding who and what gets to travel in the slow lane and who gets to travel in the fast lane. Only by treating the internet essentially as a dumb pipe will consumers get what they expect and deserve from their ISPs. That's not to say that folks or companies can't pay more for faster service. It just needs be offered on a non-discriminatory basis. For some important and learned perspectives on the subject manner, see Ed Felton's (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/three-flavors-net-neutrality) and Larry Lessig's (http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall.html and http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/16/EDM11064UL.DTL) work in the area. Tim Lee from the Freedom to Tinker group also lends some interesting perspectives to the argument (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/tblee/journal-misunderstands-content-delivery-networks).

Alas, FCC-imposed net neutrality rules seem to be coming down the pike... http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/09/20/technology-technology-hardware-amp-equipment-us-internet-rules_6907223.html?partner=alerts

John, that's wishful thinking. Broadband *is* just a dumb pipe. That is also the ultimate destiny of wireless carriers, no matter how much they wish it weren't so. Customers want somebody to supply the flow of data. They don't want a network manager/nanny, picking and choosing for them what they can use.

@Jim: No, broadband is not a dumb pipe or a pipe of any kind. Neither you nor the OP have latched onto the humor some derive from the public adoption of once sardonic terminology. Jumbling wires no more creates bandwidth than does shaking the components of a clock in a bag... nor could either ever effect structure