FCC still studying net neutrality

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/27/2007 - 07:13

Slashdot reports that the FCC is still studying net neutrality. The problem is, there really is not anything to study. Big carriers are playing all sorts of games with traffic to favor their own services (e.g. VoIP) over the services of competitors (e.g. Vonage, Skype). Google is buying fiber because it knows it cannot rely on others to carry bandwidth-intensive video traffic. YouTube is valuable only if people can actually play the videos, and that means being able to deliver the video across the network end to end.

Unless we want the economic future of our communities controlled by broadband providers, things have to change. The FCC's "yet another study" approach is consistent with their general favoritism towards big providers and an utter lack of interest in developing new models for telecommunications service delivery.

Communities like Palo Alto, California have decided that local control, using a community-managed form of net neutrality, is the right way to go, and I agree. Local net neutrality can be easily accomplished with an open services architecture that provides a fair and level playing field for all qualified service providers.