Net Neutral Musicians are Pirates?

I wondered how long it would take for somebody to try this:

"To what extent are supporters of net neutrality also tacitly supporting piracy?"

— Get Real - The Net Is Not Neutral, By Sonia Arrison, TechNewsWorld, 04/13/07 4:00 AM PT

Speak up for open connectivity and free speech, as Rock the Net is doing, and you're a supporter of piracy?

She concludes her column with:

In the real world, the net is not neutral. Some Web site operators spend more than others to make their sites more appealing to consumers and, in the music industry, some songs will now be sold for a decidedly non-neutral price.

Er, nobody is arguing about making web sites attractive. The point is that everybody should be able to get to any web site. She gives an example (Apple selling non-DRM songs for a higher price than its DRM-encoded iTunes songs) that demonstrates she's confusing application competition with what net neutrality is actually concerned about, namely connectivity surcharges and slow paths for those who don't pay them.

Speaking of piracy, music companies would do well to recognize a market demand when they see one and to do something to address it, as Apple, almost alone, seems to be doing. That would sure beat suing their own customers.

I saw this column via Hands off the Internet, who comment:

Networks are great, but they can be abused, and those who use more should pay more. Likewise, if you want to move audio or video packets along a network at a guaranteed rate, that costs a bit more, too. If anything, musicians should want their music and music videos to be delivered using state of the art technology. Whatever Dorgan-Snowe would do, it certainly won’t help that.

—Should Musicians Be For Net Neutrality? Hands off the Internet, April 17, 2007 at 12:29 pm

Um, those who use more do pay more, as in more for more bandwidth. If ISPs have set their end-user charges so they don't collect enough revenue per user to pay for the bandwidth they're selling, maybe they need to revisit what they're charging or, better, the provisioning of their end-user services.

In countries such as Japan and Korea that have real fast Internet service (50Mbps, 100Mbps, or up), special fast lanes for video or audio aren't much of an issue, because ordinary lanes are fast enough.

Rather than gaming the political system so that they can cherry-pick fast services and lucrative customers, telcos and cablecos would do better to provide faster end-user connections so that they could compete with their equivalents around the world. U.S. and Canadian application vendors would do better then, too.

-jsq