^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Vint Cerf and Net Neutrality

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf penned a letter expressing his fear that legislation before the House Energy & Commerce Committee “would do great damage to the Internet as we know it.” Cerf is now an employee of Google, a great company that unfortunately strongly supports the legislation’s net neutrality provisions.

According to Cerf:

“The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design.”

The term “in many ways” is an important qualification. As elegant as the architecture of the Internet is, the essential fact remains that the Internet is what it is today because it was allowed to develop unencumbered by regulation. Does anyone seriously believe that the Internet would be recognizable today if bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. or 51 public service commissions had played a significant role in its development? Cerf is advocating much more than a free and open Internet. He is advocating the heavy hand of government regulation. What he may not realize is that regulation is slow, clumsy, insidious and routinely exploited by special interests.
Cerf also has this to say:

“Many people will have little or no choice among broadband operators for the foreseeable future, implying that such operators will have the power to exercise a great deal of control over any applications placed on the network.”

“Many” people is not most people. At a minimum there’s the cable company, the wireline phone company and the wireless phone company, with other technologies like Broadband Power Line, fixed wireless and satellite ramping up. We have adequate competition now to justify codifying the FCC’s policy of protecting the Internet from regulation, with a powerful and unmistakable trend in the direction of more competition fully evident.
Supporters of net neutrality, like Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America, love to claim that there is “an extensive, documented track record of abashed discrimination against competitors[.]” This allegation is also notable for being very carefully worded. If Cooper is citing the consent decree that broke up AT&T in the early 1980s — before the Internet was created — then his use of the term “extensive” might make sense. However, since the Internet was created, the FCC has taken enforcement action against 1 company for blocking its customers’ access to Vonage. Examples of government-sponsored filtering can be found in countries like China, Iran, Myanmar and Bahrain. There was an example of site blocking in Canada as part of a management-labor dispute, but it was quickly detected and ended — not as a result of enforcement action by a regulatory agency, but due to media attention.
In a free and open country like Canada or the U.S., there is no place for an Internet with walls — nor would there be any tolerance for one.