^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Charging for web speed

At a Congressional staff briefing this week, the Chief Technology Officer of BellSouth referenced an agreement between BellSouth and Movielink in which BellSouth receives a fee to ensure that Movielink’s customers can download movies quickly — even if they have a slow Internet connection. In today’s Washington Post, Gigi Sohn — an advocate of “network neutrality” — ridiculed the arrangement with this clever comment: “If we want to ruin the Internet, we’ll turn it into a cable TV system.” I would actually hate to see the Internet turn into either a cable TV system or a telephone network. That’s the problem with Sohn’s proposal.
Sohn’s proposal would turn the Internet into a wasteland where transport providers can’t make any money. The problem with that is no one will invest another penny to make the Internet faster or more ubiquitous. The BellSouth-Movielink arrangement has at least two pro-consumer advantages that are being overlooked. One is that customers who elect to pay for a slow Internet connection can get faster downloads that are subsidized by others. Another is that as BellSouth invests in network upgrades to provide a higher quality experience for Movielink’s customers, traffic moves more quickly resulting in faster speeds for everyone.