Notebaert right about 'neutrality'

Plan should slow investment

Published January 13, 2007 at midnight

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Qwest CEO Dick Notebaert didn't mince words when asked on Thursday about attempts in Congress to set up speed traps in cyberspace.

And we hope that he can get a sympathetic hearing from enough lawmakers, and even President Bush, so that the confining vision of "net neutrality" does not become federal policy.

Speaking at a conference at the University of Denver, Notebaert called a federal proposal to mandate net neutrality "nuts," and deployed some colorful analogies. He said if a similar model were imposed on other industries, there'd be only one class of mail delivery . . . or every airline would operate like Southwest, with no pre-assigned seats and a cattle call at check-in.

The legislation at issue, the Internet Freedom Protection Act, would prevent telcos and cable companies from charging higher rates to content providers - including Microsoft, Apple and Disney - that will demand huge swaths of bandwidth for the games, music and video signals they want to hawk in cyberspace.

The bill has bipartisan support, but it's misguided. Net neutrality would slow or stifle the construction of the new pipeline needed for high-speed content, because the companies that want to expand the information superhighway would have no guarantee that they could recoup their investments.

The primary worry fueling the net neutrality movement is a hypothetical one. Net neutrality proponents fret that the Qwests and Comcasts of the world will establish the equivalent of "tolls on the Internet."

But if that were to happen, it would only involve enhanced content and service. And how is that different in principle from pricing that already exists?

Internet Service Providers now charge tolls: subscription fees based on the speed of the service they offer. Dial-up accounts cost less per month than DSL or high-speed cable access because they deliver information at slower rates.

What's changing is that bandwidth-sucking content is going online faster than the Qwests and Comcasts can build the room to handle it. It's as if Hummer owners thought they were entitled to squeeze their behemoths onto traffic lanes that were designed to handle Mini Coopers.

The telcos and cable companies want the Hummer drivers to pay extra and widen the lanes.

As we've said before, we have no idea whether investors will support this type of business model. But Washington should not spike the concept by mandating net neutrality - or cyberspace is likely to get a lot more congested for no good reason, and with the gridlock only worsening over time.

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