Unpacking the net neutrality issue for enterprises

Do you think the Internet should be open? I presume you do. Do you think the Internet should stay deregulated? I presume you do.

Now tell me what your position is on "net neutrality," if you know what that is.

Answer: You're both for and against it.

How's that again? Well, corporate network professionals who are plugged in to the Washington telecom scene -- such as the members of the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee, which is represented by LB3 -- probably understand the trick I employed in framing the question.

Like so many telecom regulatory issues, the net neutrality issue features advocates on both sides who sell the merits of their position based on a similar-sounding benefit to users.

Net neutrality is the notion that major ISPs -- which these days essentially means the big telecom and cable companies -- should not discriminate among types of content. It also means that providers should not give favored access to their own content-based services if another provider wants to reach their subscribers with a similar service.

The FCC has for a while had some vanilla-sounding principles ensuring freedom of movement of content around the Internet and freedom of access. But today the commission initiated a rulemaking which would enshrine the specific idea of net neutrality under regulations.

The FCC's move is getting a fair bit of attention. That's partly because it's a pet issue of new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who was a Harvard Law School buddy of President Obama's. It's also partly because it pits two major vendor groups against each other.

Those who say they want the Internet to be "open" are essentially a proxy for content providers such as Google, Amazon, eBay and others who fear (or say they fear) the control that AT&T, Verizon and big cable companies have over the pipes to subscribers. They support net neutrality -- in fact, they've practically sponsored the issue.

Those who say they want the Internet to "stay deregulated" are exactly the big carriers such as AT&T and Verizon who say net neutrality either is unnecessary or would be downright harmful. They've complained that traffic management practices of the sort that net neutrality would appear to knock out are perfectly normal. And they say that without the freedom to employ these practices, broadband fiber and mobile networks won't be built out any further.

So you see, the framing trick really isn't mine -- it's inherent in the issue. In fact, while the impact of net neutrality on enterprise users is not direct, at least not yet, the two sides of the debate do in fact mirror two natural instincts of our corporate user marketplace.

Business users instinctively understand that AT&T and Verizon are growing in market power. While the scattered examples of these companies supposedly knocking out content aren't very convincing so far, users know that a limited number of suppliers (especially in the last mile) threatens trouble down the road both on price and control.

But users also understand the concepts of class of service, congestion management, and traffic shaping on the engineering side, and the basic idea of volume discounts on the pricing side. At least conceptually, net neutrality can come across as a naive and artificial guarantor of access to content, no matter its bandwidth, sensitivity to latency, or point of origin, although some net neutrality advocates say their position is more sophisticated than that.

All this has become a growing concern as end-users rapidly step up their demand for mobile broadband applications. Spectrum isn't just there for the taking, and the idea of a regulatorily mandated free-for-all won't achieve much if all it does is cause congestion for everyone. Expect the wireless issues to be front and center in the net neutrality debate, much more so than if it had been proposed in this way even as recently as two years ago.

I know that the Ad Hoc Committee will be participating in this rulemaking and assessing it from enterprises' dual and overlapping roles as purchasers of network services and providers of increasingly critical e-commerce streams even in prosaic, non-glamorous industries. Stay tuned for more on this issue as it works through the FCC process. And remember to get the whole story, not just some big vendor's framing of the issue.