Now, I work on net neutrality for the Hands Off coalition in Washington, which opposes new laws in this area, and does have some ISPs in our membership. From this perspective and the experience I’ve picked up, it’s overwhelmingly clear to me that there is no appetite for the kinds of wars you describe. The lone case of blocking that supporters of new NN regulations can name, is when Madison River blocked Vonage briefly in 2005. The FCC stepped in, told them to knock it off, and they did. What everyone realizes today that they didn’t really get a decade ago is that if you have the pipes, you want all the best content on it. And if you have the content, you want it on all the pipes.

The point of tiering isn’t to play blocking games with content owners or ISPs, it’s to offer even faster speeds for content, and see to it that those who are using more bandwidth are paying their way — and not say, being subsidized by your grandma who only ever checks her e-mail.

Universities filter known malware packets. ISPs drop known phishing email. This is also not new: in the early 1990s universities with full netnews feeds dropped a usenet group devoted to child pr0n. These seem like reasonable — good, even — things. I suspect that statistics on dropped spam and botnet traffic would show that if we moved to a purely neutral Internet it would auger into the ground. This suggests an equally reasonable stance might be don’t move to NN; don’t break the ‘net.

Yet it is a very quick hop to filtering out merely undesirable content. Personally, I want all of my spam and will sift through it myself. If I fall for a phishing attack that’s my own damn fault. But I would hate to see that standard applied to my mother. Especially when I get the phone call to rebuild her system. And there’s not much I can do for her when she has her social security number, birth date, etc. out in the wild.

I am not arguing with any particular point you raised, but rather with the notion this is something simple. Rather than dropping into pro- and anti-NN camps, I would rather see discussion about how to get the advantages of NN without also incurring unacceptable costs, a world where ISPs and telcos are gatekeepers with the power to decide who speaks and listens. If the geeks can’t figure it out, the wonks sure won’t.

When it comes to network neutrality, it’s even worse in the wireless world.

Here’s an excellent paper by Tim Wu who’s a law professor at Columbia:
http://www.newamerica.net/files/WorkingPaper17_WirelessNetNeutrality_Wu.pdf

- Joe