Common carriage describes many net
neutrality advocates' position. Unfortunately, many of us tend to
think of net neutrality in a single-minded way. Specifically, we think
about it in terms of transportation systems and other services that are
offered for the "public good". A great definition can be found here. For many, net neutrality does not equal supporting common carriage.
In my opinion, net neutrality is a really
bad term for those people advocating maintaining the Internet's
end-to-end principle or those supporting Internet Service Providers'
(ISPs') requirement to adhere to the requirements of common carriage.
For many net neutrality advocates, this goes well beyond requiring
common carriage. They want to insist that ISPs may not charge more
money for better than best-effort bandwidth or require them to
completely open up their pipes to all outside parties at the same rates
they charge to their internal groups. Of course, at the other end of
the spectrum exists and pro multi-tier Internet group who want to
fundamentally change the existing rules for best-effort bandwidth
pricing. Ed Whitacre's comments are representative of this point of view. To put this in
perspective, I put together the following visual. (You can click on it
to enlarge.)
By thinking about perspectives on the
multi-tier Internet and net neutrality as a spectrum or continuum, we can better
understand the politics as well as lack of clarity on the subject. I argue that most
people's views are not at one extreme or the other. Instead, I believe,
most broadband users as well as ISPs would prefer to support the notion
of common carriage for new services like video streaming. Some,
may even want to see this extended to VoIP providers like Skype and
Vonage
-- giving these companies competitive access to low latency services on
the
broadband pipes. My guess, is that if your a current user of these
services you probably are in this camp but you wouldn't push the
envelope too far by taking the extreme position that ISPs must
completely open their pipes.
At the other end, you may only care about net neutrality if a
"direct peering" model exists for broadband providers as has been
articulated by some. Under this approach, access network
providers (broadband ISPs) would interconnect their networks with big
media. In this way, ISPs would only sell their premium bandwidth
services to those companies who interconnected with them to their
network. It certainly would not support the end-to-end principle
or the requirements of common carriage because not everyone who was
connected to the Internet backbone could get access to this better
bandwidth.
How does your view on the subject fit under this model?
Jeff Turner
|
