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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.

Hance Haney

Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project
Hance Haney served as Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute, in Washington, D.C. Haney spent ten years as an aide to former Senator Bob Packwood (OR), and advised him in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Communications Subcommittee during the deliberations leading to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He subsequently held various positions with the United States Telecom Association and Qwest Communications. He earned a B.A. in history from Willamette University and a J.D. from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.