Net Neutrality is perhaps the strangest political issue around. And by strange, I mean that most people don’t seem to know what exactly it’s about, and practically nobody knows which people are on which side.
The short version is:
For Net Neutrality –> For FCC regulation of internet service providers
Against Net Neutrality –> Approximately for the status quo
Most neo-cons are against, liberals are divided, the usual.
The weirdness starts when the libertarians get involved. Their position?
Screw the politics –> develop an independent, near-unregulated internet
The most vocal element of net neutrality support is represented by savetheinternet.com – they’re a pretty typical liberalish organization, petitioning Congress to enact legislation to allow the FCC to regulate service providers (a power which the Supreme Court has struck down).
They’ve been mostly unsuccessful thus far, partly because of a rather vocal group of libertarians. The libertarian approach is neatly summed up in this post by Eric S. Raymond. The basic idea amounts to this: the telcos have previously used regulation to increase their last-mile monopolies. Thus, more regulation would only increase their hold on the market. The purposed solution is to ignore the entire political situation, de-license the airwaves, and work on wireless mesh networking. (ESR explicitly insists that the political battle is unwinnable.)
Which sounds great to some people’s ears. A year ago, I’d have mostly agreed – who really wants more government regulation?
Except… the current state of wireless mesh networking is nothing more than a lab experiment. Universities are playing with it; there aren’t any real large-scale products available. There aren’t even any official standards for it yet. Other alternatives are much the same way. And in all honesty, to get any sort of distributed networking system working will likely require government support, if only to subsidize widespread adoption.
Which leads me to this conclusion – when your wonderful new wireless system finally becomes feasible, who do you want to be in control of the Internet – The feds, or AT&T/Verizon/Level 3? I’m not saying that regulation is perfect – but let’s face it, the regulation of telephone lines has ensured that you can call someone almost anywhere in the world without difficulty. Why should internet access be any different?