DOJ: No legislation for Network Neutrality
Along with the Web 2.0 movement came a huge push for Network Neutrality, a cause whose proponents demand that all access to the Internet occur as equally as possible. In other words, AT&T can't charge Google more to transfer a byte of data because Google has figured out a way to make more money off of AT&T's bandwidth than AT&T themselves can do. Likewise, a cable Internet provider can't provide better bandwidth to users of its VoIP phone service than to non-using subscribers. That's the concept. The ideal? Make the Internet a great place for competing service providers to flourish.
In reality, Network Neutrality, or Netnoot, as some have taken to calling it, was a flawed concept from the beginning. DSL carriers already charge premium fees for preferential treatment by way of imposing often-arbitrary speed limits (768k DSL is more costly than 256k dsl, etc.) even when no technical reason exists to impose such limits. Plus, the big Internet providers who count among their customers gigantic bandwidth hogs like Google and MySpace are already gleaning more revenue from them than they are from Joe Bob's Bicycle Shop. So the folks who consume more already pay more. As such, consumers demand that, at least in matters of speed, the Internet be non-neutral.
Wise to these realities, the Department of Justice today announced that they will not be pursuing any further legislative attempts to regulate carrier activity on the Net. Good move. If people want to pay less for bandwidth or choose a different provider for phone service than for data access, they'll do it. We don't need laws to enforce what consumers already do.
