Net Neutrality: Let There Be Laws

President Obama on Monday asked the Federal Communications Commission "to implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality," and to extend those rules to cover mobile broadband.

It's about time. The FCC needed to hear in unequivocal terms that anything less than strong net neutrality protection would risk turning the open Internet into something more like the fiefdoms of cable television.

The President's plan would reclassify wired and wireless broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunication Act. It would prevent ISPs from blocking legal content; it would prevent ISPs from throttling data flows; it would make peering arrangements between network providers more transparent to the FCC; and it would ban paid prioritization of Internet traffic.

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Regulation can hinder businesses. But some businesses should be hindered because they have the potential to interfere with other businesses. Without net neutrality regulations, the Internet becomes a protection racket. Network owners have the option to slow certain network traffic if the source of that traffic fails to pay above and beyond the agreed upon rate.

Comcast in 2007 blocked BitTorrent file sharing intermittently before public criticism forced the company to stop doing so. In February, blogger David Raphael accused Verizon of slowing Netflix traffic in Texas. Verizon denied the charge. But assessing the truth of Verizon's claim would require net neutrality rules, which would impose transparency requirements on network operations.

Neither Comcast nor Verizon likes the idea of being regulated. Comcast said Title II reclassification "would jeopardize this engine for job creation and investment as well as the innovation cycle that the Internet has generated." Verizon said, "Reclassification under Title II, which for the first time would apply 1930s-era utility regulation to the Internet, would be a radical reversal of course that would in and of itself threaten great harm to an open Internet, competition and innovation."

If Verizon bristles at being bound by a law that originated as far back as 1934, it must be fuming at its tax obligations under the even more antiquated 1788 United States Constitution.

But leaving that bit of rhetoric aside, the arguments posed by telecommunications companies make no sense. Verizon calls the proposed Title II reclassification "a radical reversal of course," even as Comcast insists

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