I thought I’d talk a bit more about
Tim Schneider’s recent
post at
Public Knowledge.
Tim links to an incident where Verizon terminated an EVDO customer’s account. Verizon claimed that the “extraordinarily high usage” of the account was proof positive that the customer had violated the terms of service by streaming or downloading music or video.
But what if we had some form of
net neutrality? It would seem that Verizon could still be free to terminate accounts at their discretion. It might make good business sense to do so. If bandwidth costs Verizon money, even over DSL, then excluding the tiny fraction of their customer base who consume a vast majority of their bandwidth would make sense. They might not even need to raise the bogeyman of “terms of service” and face the non-neutral net problem that Tim describes. They might simply have the right to terminate for unusually high usage, or for nothing at all. Or, less controversially, to move you from a flat-rate plan to a metered plan.
The problem with flat-fee Internet might be that less skilled, less demanding users (mom and pop checking email) may be subsidizing highly skill, high consumption users. If $29.95 has a reasonable profit margin for the 300Mb a month downloader, can it still cover the cost of the 30Gb a month downloader?
There’s a very excellent
article (via
Techdirt) by Tom Evslin, founder of AT&T Worldnet, that questions whether bandwidth usage like this actually costs the ISP at all. It certainly has questioned some of my assumptions. But for services like cable Internet, the local loop can be saturated by heavy use, and certainly EVDO and wireless will have similar issues.
Now, granted, the Snowe/Dorgan amendment
might have limited this with Section 12(a)(1): “not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet;”
But this goes well beyond, I think, most peoples’ concept of net neutrality. Here, in an effort to block preferential and discriminatory treatment of content over the Internet, we suggest that there’s a limitation on when and how an ISP can deny service to users.
Net neutrality might be sound, but doesn’t this kind of regulation seem a bit too much?
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