National broadband happy talk papers over net neutrality fight

In some ways, broadband has become the tech industry's equivalent to healthcare and education: everybody agrees that it's a good thing and everybody thinks all Americans should have access to it.

A quick glance over the deadline-beating public comments filed with the FCC this week shows that the vast majority of industry players and consumer advocates think that universal broadband access is a noble goal worth working toward. The Internet Innovation Alliance, for instance, says that the national broadband plan should "enable the government to partner with the private sector to extend broadband service to every corner of the country." AT&T, meanwhile, says that the broadband plan's two goals should be ensuring broadband access and adoption "for 100% of Americans" by 2014. And the Computer & Communications Industry Association says simply that the plan "must ensure that all Americans have access to broadband."

So everybody likes broadband. The big question, however, is what type of Internet our broadband connections will deliver. Network neutrality advocates this week launched a campaign urging the FCC to ensure that any national broadband strategy includes net neutrality rules. The campaign, called "It's the Internet, Stupid," makes the explicit argument that broadband connectivity without an open Internet is worthless.

"Broadband is not the Internet," the group said in its letter to the FCC, which was signed by well-known net neutrality advocates such as Larry Lessig, Harold Feld, Scott Bradner, Jeff Jarvis and Craig's List founder Craig Newmark. "The essence of the Internet is that it carries all packets that follow its protocols regardless of what kinds of data the packets carry."

Broadly speaking, net neutrality is the principle that ISPs should not be allowed to block or degrade Internet traffic from their competitors in order to speed up their own. The major telcos have uniformly opposed net neutrality by arguing that such government intervention would take away ISPs' incentives to upgrade their networks, thus stalling the widespread deployment of broadband Internet. The fight over net neutrality has only intensified now that the government has designated $7.2 billion to fund broadband infrastructure in the recently passed economic stimulus package, as net neutrality proponents have argued that the money will be wasted if it funds networks that do not deliver an open Internet.

Specifically, the "It's the Internet, Stupid" campaign wants the FCC to implement the "nondiscrimination and network interconnection obligations" that the commission first outlined in 2005 as part of any broadband plan. These principles state that networks must allow users to access any lawful Internet content of their choice, to run any legal Web applications of their choice, and to connect to the network using any device that does not harm the network. The campaign also wants the FCC to "prohibit discriminatory or preferential treatment of packets based on sender, recipient of packet contents" in its national broadband plan.