^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Politico outsmarts engineer

How is it that in a technical discussion former White House press secretary Mike McCurry can get the best of Craigslist founder Craig “Hey, I’m an engineer” Newmark? Silicon Valley’s self-destructive hatred of the telecom companies continues to astound. See the Newmark-McCurry debate over “net neutrality” and also my reply at The Wall Street Journal.

From: Guest 5:18 pm
To: WSJ.com Editors (27 of 29)
3897.27 in reply to 3897.1
The “net neutrality” debate has become so confused that even the Journal’s brief introduction to the McCurry-Newmark debate got it wrong. Congress is *not* “mull[ing] legislation that would allow Internet service providers to charge Web sites for preferred delivery of digital content.” Network operators have always charged different prices for different amounts and qualities of bandwidth. Just like any other product. Nothing new there. Congress *is* mulling legislation that would regulate bandwidth prices and network functionality, with potentially disastrous effects on Internet investment and effectiveness.
Mr. Newmark’s statement that “bandwidth is not an issue” is absurd. Today’s last mile links to homes and businesses are nowhere near robust and capacious enough to handle the coming surge of high-definition video and other rich Internet content. The empty fiber he cites refers to overcapacity on long haul routes in between cities, or the “core” of the network. At the “edges” of the network, however, we will need to invest some $100 billion in new fiber optic access networks to link end-users to this capacious core. Mr. Newmark, who boasts, “Hey, I’m an engineer,” should know better than to misrepresent this elementary distinction between core and access networks. Even the core of the network will require further upgrades as real broadband fills the Internet’s existing pipes.
These massive fiber optic investments cannot be made if the federal government micromanages and litigates every price and interaction on the Net, as the “net neutrality” legislation would do. The ill-conceived 1996 Telecom Act, which socialized the physical layer of the Net, already delayed deployment of these networks for the last decade and shifted broadband leadership to Asia. Net neutrality legislation now threatens to repeat the same fundamental mistakes, this time by socializing the logical layer of the Net, and portends another decade of American communications decline.
The Silicon Valley companies who support new regulation of the Net are stupendously short-sighted. Most of their business plans depend on big bandwidth. But the policies they advocate could deep six not only the investment plans of the cable and telecom companies but also their own business strategies that require fast connections to as many consumers as possible. Silicon Valley should reconsider: Do they really want Washington to begin regulating what has heretofore been the globe’s freest platform for commerce and culture?
Bret Swanson
Senior Fellow
Discovery Institute