This Wednesday, September 10th, is a day of action to alert everyone about the danger of fast and slow lanes for last mile internet access. I have written a lot about this topic here on Continuations. For the perspective of the CEO of a startup, you can read this great piece by Chad Dickerson from Etsy in Wired.
So what can you do? For starters you should sign the Battle for the Net citizen letter. Then, if you have a website or service you should add the modal window to let others know to do the same.
You will also be hearing lots of FUD in the coming weeks along two lines in particular. First, that net neutrality will prevent cable companies and telcos from investing enough in the last mile networks. Second, people will try to argue that tech companies are trying to have it both ways by wanting no regulation for the like of AirBnB and Uber but “old style telco regulation” for last mile internet access.
On the first point others have already done a great job pointing out how incredibly profitable the access companies are and that they could easily afford more investment in network capacity without requiring and ability to establish paid prioritization. So I will focus on the second point.
When thinking about regulation it is useful to go back to a historic example that’s far enough back so that the dust has settled. In a recent talk I looked at what happened when cars were first invented. There was a bunch of early regulation that effectively tried to restrict cars to speeds of horse drawn buggies and impose other severe limitations. Some of these were motivated by a genuine desire to prevent accidents others to protect existing industries.
Cars ultimately really took off when we came up with regulation that enabled adoption such as rules of the road and more importantly investment in actual roads up to and including the Interstate Highway System. In an interesting parallel we had no trouble charging individuals tolls for access to (some of) those highways but imagine the outcry if existing car companies could have paid to have their make of car or truck go faster.
Bottom line then is it is silly to be against all regulation. Some regulation is needed to make new technologies successful. Maintaining neutrality on the last mile is exactly one of those regulations that helps innovation (like open roads did for cars).
