Court says "No" to FCC on regulation

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 04/06/2010 - 13:12

A D.C. court ruled against the FCC's attempt to regulate how Comcast manages its network. The ruling dates back to a 2008 order that FCC imposed on Comcast, which was slowing down high bandwidth file sharing for some of its customers.

This is not likely to please very many people. Consumer advocates think Internet service providers need more regulation--they are unhappy about this. And the big incumbent service providers--AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, and others--are upset that the FCC tried this in the first place.

As I have written in the past, network neutrality can be achieved easily by changing the business model for delivering services, and without the overhead of government regulation. Open access networks like Utopia, The Wired Road, nDanville, Palm Coast FiberNET, and others already have network neutrality, and these networks got there by building a single high performance infrastructure shared by all providers. Consumers get competitive pricing with substantial cost reductions, and providers compete based on quality of service and price. Network neutrality is achieved at the contract level by having the network infrastructure managed by a neutral third party. Everybody wins, especially buyers of services.

Prices go down and innovation is greatest when you have a single, maximally sized market space with many buyers and sellers. This is very easy to do, and as I noted, it is already being done.