Cowan's Analogies

Venture capitalist David Cowan takes the time to write up some objections to net neutrality:

'The call for net neutrality is superficially appealing, in the same way that it's easy to oppose free trade in defense of your countrymen's jobs.'

—Net Neutrality is Politically Correct, David Cowan, who has time for this? Saturday, February 10, 2007

Actually, net neutrality promotes worldwide free trade in information. Unfortunately, most of his other analogies are equally forced.

'Market forces will, as they always have, drive innovation on the internet. ISPs will find ways to accelerate and guarantee delivery with all sorts of interesting new services, and businesses who can deliver more value to their consumers through better internet performance can afford to pay for them. Should Fedex have been prohibited from competing against the Post Office, so that "big corproations" wouldn't have an advantage over the little guy? Of course not.'

Where are these market forces in a duopoly? Railroads and telephones are also businesses, but governments regulate them in the public interest regarding essential facilities access (bottlenecks) or interconnection access (bandwagons).

See Oren Michels on how Fedex cherrypicking fast delivery only works because there is a postal service that handles delivery of everything else to everybody else. A real analogy to Fedex would be to a new, faster, ISP arising to compete with the telco and cableco duopoly.

The big telcos or cablecos implementing a fast lane for IPTV isn't going to help any smaller ISP compete, and will actively suppress smaller application providers from competing.

'There is no limit to the number of lanes one can build on the information highway, unless of course you regulate and cripple the only entities capable of building those lanes.'

Multiple fast lanes, as in multiple cable TV channels? Where did flickr, YouTube, and facebook develop, on cable TV, or on the net neutral Internet?

He ridicules Alyssa Milano for expressing the political concerns of many Internet users; concerns consistent with the historical facts. Corporations (with government) did in fact take away our right to choose much of anything but mass media in newspapers, radio, and TV (see Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks), and there's no reason to believe the same economic incentives for size and centralization won't apply to ISPs unless government requires the duopoly to provide neutral access or more competitors arise (or both).

He ridicules Eric Schmidt, CEO of google, adding:

'the market will not reward ISPs who effectively block or even slow access to the full array of web sites--there is demand for express traffic and free traffic, so both sevices should and would exist.'

Well, except for things that are just "to amuse Eric with whatever internet sites he craves", and that it's not worth delivering those "random packets" in a timely manner; better to concentrate on those fast lane cash cows. When that happens, those ISPs will indeed be "control[ling] what people do online."

I don't know what amuses Eric online, but I do know that he found a way to monetize google, giving him cash to buy YouTube and otherwise support innovation. Can any telco or cableco make any similar claim?

After a few mostly trivial cases of potential conflicts with net neutrality, Cowan gets to this:

'How about blocking access to sites that are pornographic, violent, hateful, illegal (casinos), or ridden with viruses?'

Notice how quickly subjectively characterized content (pornographic, violent, hateful) becomes conflated with illegal or harmful? This is why telcos and cablecos shouldn't be deciding who gets to send what to whom. Sure, any of these things could be legal problems that an ISP has to deal with on a case by case basis, especially if confronted with a legal requirement to do so. But legal or security problems with specific sites are getting pretty far afield from net neutrality.

'What about simply selling higher quality service plans that give more bursty bandwidth when needed?'

Now there's an idea! How about simply selling faster bandwidth for all bits?

'Engineers have done pretty well so far building the internet without regulatory oversight. If we now erect a glorious bureaucracy of regulators who painstakingly review every upgrade to a broadband carrier, the one thing I am sure of is that US carriers will immediately lose market share to their competitors. The state of the U.S. internet backbone itself will freeze both in capacity and technology as the rest of the planet leapfrogs our creaky, petrified infrastructure.'

There was no such glorious bureaucracy before the FCC removed the last net neutrality requirements in August 2005 and there's no reason to believe a huge bureaucracy would be needed if the FCC or Congress put net neutrality requirements back. Net neutrality isn't that complicated: let bits be bits.

I don't know why Cowan is sure U.S. carriers would lose market share to their competitors; he gives no reasons. In Japan and Korea and elsewhere broadband is already more than 10 times faster than the piddling speeds U.S. ISP customers can get, and the U.S. keeps falling farther behind in broadband speeds and uptake. NTT, from Japan where a form of net neutrality prevails, is already poised to eat AT&T's lunch. Letting the U.S. telco and cableco duopoly feast on fast IPTV while tossing the baby of innovation out with the bathwater of 'pornographic, violent, hateful, illegal (casinos), or ridden with viruses' will not help U.S. competitiveness.

Cowan started his blog entry with this quote:

'"People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo." -- Max Eastman'

Yes, net neutrality is the status quo and we do want to keep it. This status quo has enabled anonymous FTP, the World Wide Web, Yahoo!, flickr, google, YouTube, facebook, BitTorrent, Skype, blogs, and many other innovations.

Being for that status quo is being for innovation and freedom.

-jsq