Everybody Goes First!

My old colleague Wayne Crews makes an important point about net neutrality:

Everybody agrees openness is good; nobody wants their favorite websites or activities blocked.

But it’s not OK to condemn the very possibility of adopting proprietary, exclusionary business models—especially at this critical point in business and communications history. It’s only 2008.

All wealth—infrastructure and content alike—must be created, often over decades. Net neutrality, by turning existing pipes into passive, regulated husks, is as fantastic as “Search Neutrality” imposed upon Google would be. (“All search results must appear first!”) It’s just not as obvious.

Neutrality supporters tend to talk in the language of equality, but while that’s a nice ideal, it’s just not feasible. Just like two cars forced to merge into the same lane on a highway, when two pieces of information have to pass through a cable, one of them, in the end, has to go first.  So equality isn’t even possible.

Moreover, it seems like it’s not even desirable. The idea with neutrality isn’t really to create a blocked, barely usable system, but instead to create one with tiers of service options.  This is pretty common in many industries: hotels have different sized rooms with different amenities, airplanes have first class seats, and FedEx has rush delivery.  These aren’t services that most people need all the time, and needless to say, they’re fundamentally unequal — you pay more and get better service.  And in the end, that’s all that those of us who oppose net neutrality want to make (and in some cases keep) available on the net.