From the beginning — that is, since the advent of the net neutrality concept early last decade — I argued that a strict neutrality regime would have outlawed, among other important technologies, CDNs, which prioritized traffic and made (make!) the Web video revolution possible.

So I took particular notice of this new interview (sub. required) with Akamai CEO Paul Sagan in the February 2011 issue of MIT’s Technology Review:

TR: You’re making copies of videos and other Web content and distributing them from strategic points, on the fly.

Paul Sagan: Or routes that are picked on the fly, to route around problematic conditions in real time. You could use Boston [as an analogy]. How do you want to cross the Charles to, say, go to Fenway from Cambridge? There are a lot of bridges you can take. The Internet protocol, though, would probably always tell you to take the Mass. Ave. bridge, or the BU Bridge, which is under construction right now and is the wrong answer. But it would just keep trying. The Internet can’t ever figure that out — it doesn’t. And we do.

There it is. Akamai and other content delivery networks (CDNs), including Google, which has built its own CDN-like network, “route around” “the Internet,” which “can’t ever figure . . . out” the fastest path needed for robust packet delivery. And they do so for a price. In other words: paid priority. Content companies, edge innovators, basement bloggers, and poor non-profits who don’t pay don’t get the advantages of CDN fast lanes.

So important are CDNs in today’s Internet architecture that the FCC felt the need to explicitly exempt them. So much for a “neutral” policy.

In footnote 235 and elsewhere, the FCC seems to think CDNs are all about geographic advantages (to overcome speed-of-light delay) and server-consolidation (yielding infrastructure efficiencies to content and app providers). True enough, but the FCC ignores what Sagan believes is his key service — real-time prioritization.

The net neutrality Order allows CDN prioritization but says paid priority by broadband service providers on the customer link “would raise significant cause for concern,” and “as a general matter, it is unlikely that pay for priority would satisfy the ‘no unreasonable discrimination’ standard.”

Numerous legal infirmities are likely to kill the entire Order when reviewed by the courts. But the substantive technological problems and inconsistencies embodied in the paid priority section need to be examined. Parsing these items should help us all understand how this very complex thing we call the Internet works . . . perhaps chasten the FCC when it attempts to enforce its new rule . . . and hopefully inform a better policy should this Order be vacated.

The FCC fails to explain persuasively why CDN prioritization is much different from last-mile broadband prioritization. Even if a meaningful distinction were demonstrated, we’d still be left with a probable ban on last-mile prioritization, which is a problem because last-mile prioritization will likely prove essential for a variety of real-time communication services.

The FCC’s case really rests on Section II.B, which is all about the supposed motives of broadband service providers. Apparently, the FCC thinks CDNs should be exempt because they have no malign intent whereas broadband service providers are awash in “incentives to limit Internet openness.”

The FCC says broadband providers may have incentives to

(1) disadvantage some edge providers by blocking or controlling the transmission to end-users;

(2) charge edge providers for access or priority to end-users; and

(3) “degrade or decline to increase the quality of the service they provide to non-prioritized traffic.”

The “no blocking” principle that all parties agreed to way back in 2005 would seem to take care of ominous incentive (1). And a much simpler reliance on existing consumer and/or antitrust law could easily defang ominous incentives (2) and (3).

But these specifics fail to address the larger point: Is it even true that most incentives steer broadband service providers toward a less open Internet? Did the FCC even consider incentives that point in the opposite direction — toward a more open Internet? I can’t find any evidence they did.

The FCC apparently cannot see that the vast bounty of content and apps on the Web created an entirely new market for telcos and cablecos. Namely, broadband Internet access. (Of course, in the typical two-sided coin of positive-sum innovation, it was broadband that created a new market for content and apps.)

As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal way back in 2006:

Blocking and degrading Internet access would quite simply be business suicide for incumbent service providers. Compared to cable’s other content operations like basic and premium TV channels, its broadband cable modem services are more than 50 times as profitable per unit of bandwidth consumed. This means that with just a tiny sliver of the usable bandwidth in its pipes, cable’s Internet services supply about 20% of the revenue and the majority of their net income. Does anyone really think the bandwidth providers are going to kill their golden goose?

Yes, it’s true that popular broadband Internet services also cannibalize some existing products. Long distance voice went away, and Web video is now beginning to compete with cable TV. But the telcos and cablecos know they will never be the key creators of content and apps — not compared to the rest of the world. They get the wonderful Web for free. Compared to hefty sums they must pay for TV content (e.g., ESPN) or movies, broadband access is a simple business. Why decimate the value of one of their three basic products (the others being TV and mobile) by closing off big chunks of the Web to their customers? It would be dumb. It won’t happen. It hasn’t happened.

So the FCC twists itself in pretzels trying to use a high-minded “net neutrality” or “open Internet” policy to do what it really wants — the much more vulgar task of regulating the telcos and cablecos — while exempting (for now) technologies and services that it knows are absolutely essential to a well-functioning Internet but are not at all “neutral” or “open” according to the FCC’s own criteria.

I’m glad CDNs are not covered by the rules, but in its feeble attempt to explain the broadband-CDN distinction, the FCC overlooked the fact that the no-priority rules could limit or block innovation in key real-time communications services.

CDNs are good for speeding static content and even putting some broadcast content (like live sports events) onto fast-lanes to consumers. (Akamai’s record traffic day to that point was its Web broadcast of the Masters golf tournament last spring.) But when it comes to decentralized, real-time, interactive, unpredictable, transactional content — like high-resolution video conferencing or online gaming — CDNs won’t do. We will need some form of in-stream prioritization.

But this is a matter of engineering and economics. There are several ways to achieve quality-of-experience for multimedia applications. We can create virtual (logical) channels using packet priority technologies. We can dedicate frequency (analog) channels using cable-TV like banding or, in the optical realm, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) within a wire. Or we can deploy more wires (or wireless spectrum). There are technical and financial tradeoffs between using computer power (switching) and communications power (bandwidth) to achieve these ends. They depend on the state of the existing infrastructure, the cost-performance ratios of the technologies and resources (which change over time), and the strategic architecture and business model of the network. In the end we will either prioritize digitally on the last-mile link or prioritize incoming/outgoing traffic onto/from a frequency channel just outside the FCC “no priority” zone. But that will then raise the question of whether providing such channels is itself paid priority. Do we begin to see why these are not questions that can be answered by crude politics?

By exempting CDNs, the FCC acknowledges their herculean task in delivering multimedia to the masses. Akamai cogently described the state of play when unveiling its new HD video service:

Why is it so difficult to deliver an optimal end-user experience? Simply put, it’s challenging to reliably deliver high-throughput data streams across the Web – especially to large audiences.

The fundamental challenges of online video delivery lie within the Internet itself. Given that the Internet is made up of over 13,000 competing networks, it works surprisingly well. But its many bottlenecks and capacity limitations are unpredictable and difficult to manage – lying outside the control of any single entity or group. While these problems affect the delivery of all types of Internet content, they are particularly challenging for video, which requires the transfer of large data volumes at very high rates.

But if delivering static and broadcast content is a challenge, doubly so for the coming wave of real-time interactive cinema-quality video. It’s a challenge CDNs cannot conquer and will require new technologies, architectures, and business models — many of them requiring some form of broadband prioritization — to master.

It would be a shame if the FCC’s new Order interrupted this essentially technological and economic story because of a dubious analysis that narrowly focuses on the supposed political motivations of broadband service providers and completely ignores powerful incentives pushing all parties toward Internet openness.

• The order appears to be more intrusive on the topic of “paid prioritization” than was Chairman Genachowski’s outline earlier this month. (Keep in mind, we haven’t seen the text. The FCC Commissioners themselves only got access to the text at 11:42 p.m. last night.)
• If this is true, if the “nondiscrimination” ban goes further than a simple reasonableness test, which itself would be subject to tumultuous legal wrangling, then the Net Neutrality order could cause more problems than I wrote about in this December 7 column.
• A prohibition or restriction on “paid prioritization” is a silly rule that belies a deep misunderstanding of how our networks operate today and how they will need to operate tomorrow. Here’s how I described it in recent FCC comments:

In September 2010, a new network company that had operated in stealth mode digging ditches and boring tunnels for the previous 24 months, emerged on the scene. As Forbes magazine described it, this tiny new company, Spread Networks

“spent the last two years secretly digging a gopher hole from Chicago to New York, usurping the erstwhile fastest paths. Spread’s one-inch cable is the latest weapon in the technology arms race among Wall Street houses that use algorithms to make lightning-fast trades. Every day these outfits control bigger stakes of the markets – up to 70% now. “Anybody pinging both markets  has to be on this line, or they’re dead,” says Jon A. Najarian, cofounder of OptionMonster, which tracks high-frequency trading.

“Spread’s advantage lies in its route, which makes nearly a straight line from a data center  in Chicago’s South Loop to a building across the street from Nasdaq’s servers in Carteret, N.J. Older routes largely follow railroad rights-of-way through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At 825 miles and 13.3 milliseconds, Spread’s circuit shaves 100 miles and 3 milliseconds off of the previous route of lowest latency, engineer-talk for length of delay.”

Why spend an estimated $300 million on an apparently duplicative route when numerous seemingly similar networks already exist? Because, Spread says, three milliseconds matters.

Spread offers guaranteed latency on its dark fiber product of no more than 13.33 milliseconds. Its managed wave product is guaranteed at no more than 15.75 milliseconds. It says competitors’ routes between Chicago and New York range from 16 to 20 milliseconds. We don’t know if Spread will succeed financially. But Spread is yet another demonstration that latency is of enormous and increasing importance. From entertainment to finance to medicine, the old saw is truer than ever: time is money. It can even mean life or death.

A policy implication arises. The Spread service is, of course, a form a “paid prioritization.” Companies are paying “eight to 10 times the going rate” to get their bits where they want them, when they want them.5 It is not only a demonstration of the heroic technical feats required to increase the power and diversity of our networks. It is also a prime example that numerous network users want to and will pay money to achieve better service.

One way to achieve better service is to deploy more capacity on certain links. But capacity is not always the problem. As Spread shows, another way to achieve better service is to build an entirely new 750-mile fiber route through mountains to minimize laser light delay. Or we might deploy a network of server caches that store non-realtime data closer to the end points of networks, as many Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have done. But when we can’t build a new fiber route or store data – say, when we need to get real-time packets from point to point over the existing network – yet another option might be to route packets more efficiently with sophisticated QoS technologies. Each of these solutions fits a particular situation. They take advantage of, or submit to, the technological and economic trade-offs of the moment or the era. They are all legitimate options. Policy simply must allow for the diversity and flexibility of technical and economic options – including paid prioritization – needed to manage networks and deliver value to end-users.

Depending on how far the FCC is willing to take these misguided restrictions, it could actually lead to the very outcomes most reviled by “open Internet” fanatics — that is, more industry concentration, more “walled gardens,” more closed networks. Here’s how I described the possible effect of restrictions on the important voluntary network management tools and business partnerships needed to deliver robust multimedia services:

There has also been discussion of an exemption for “specialized services.” Like wireless, it is important that such specialized services avoid the possible innovation-sapping effects of a Net Neutrality regulatory regime. But the Commission should consider several unintended consequences of moving down the path of explicitly defining, and then exempting, particular “specialized” services while choosing to regulate the so-called “basic,” “best-effort,” or “entry level” “open Internet.”

Regulating the “basic” Internet but not “specialized” services will surely push most of the network and application innovation and investment into the unregulated sphere. A “specialized” exemption, although far preferable to a Net Neutrality world without such an exemption, would tend to incentivize both CAS providers and ISPs service providers to target the “specialized” category and thus shrink the scope of the “open Internet.”

In fact, although specialized services should and will exist, they often will interact with or be based on the “basic” Internet. Finding demarcation lines will be difficult if not impossible. In a world of vast overlap, convergence, integration, and modularity, attempting to decide what is and is not “the Internet” is probably futile and counterproductive. The very genius of the Internet is its ability to connect to, absorb, accommodate, and spawn new networks, applications and services. In a great compliment to its virtues, the definition of the Internet is constantly changing. Moreover, a regime of rigid quarantine would not be good for consumers. If a CAS provider or ISP has to build a new physical or logical network, segregate services and software, or develop new products and marketing for a specifically defined “specialized” service, there would be a very large disincentive to develop and offer simple innovations and new services to customers over the regulated “basic” Internet. Perhaps a consumer does not want to spend the extra money to jump to the next tier of specialized service. Perhaps she only wants the service for a specific event or a brief period of time. Perhaps the CAS provider or ISP can far more economically offer a compelling service over the “basic” Internet with just a small technical tweak, where a leap to a full-blown specialized service would require more time and money, and push the service beyond the reach of the consumer. The transactions costs of imposing a “specialized” quarantine would reduce technical and economic flexibility on both CAS providers and ISPs and, most crucially, on consumers.

Or, as we wrote in our previous Reply Comments about a related circumstance, “A prohibition of the voluntary partnerships that are likely to add so much value to all sides of the market – service provider, content creator, and consumer – would incentivize the service provider to close greater portions of its networks to outside content, acquire more content for internal distribution, create more closely held ‘managed services’ that meet the standards of the government’s ‘exclusions,’ and build a new generation of larger, more exclusive ‘walled gardens’ than would otherwise be the case. The result would be to frustrate the objective of the proceeding. The result would be a less open Internet.”

It is thus possible that a policy seeking to maintain some pure notion of a basic “open Internet” could severely devalue the open Internet the Commission is seeking to preserve.

All this said, the FCC’s legal standing is so tenuous and this order so rooted in reasoning already rejected by the courts, I believe today’s Net Neutrality rule will be overturned. Thus despite the numerous substantive and procedural errors committed on this “darkest day of the year,” I still expect the Internet to “survive and thrive.”

Despite the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” announcement this week, the American Internet economy is likely to survive and thrive. That’s because the new proposal offered by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski is lacking almost all the worst ideas considered over the last few years. No one has warned more persistently than I against the dangers of over-regulating the Internet in the name of “net neutrality.”

In a better world, policy makers would heed my friend Andy Kessler’s advice to shutter the FCC. But back on earth this new compromise should, for the near-term at least, cap Washington’s mischief in the digital realm.

. . .

The Level 3-Comcast clash showed what many of us have said all along: “net neutrality” was a purposely ill-defined catch-all for any grievance in the digital realm. No more. With the FCC offering some definition, however imperfect, businesses will now mostly have to slug it out in a dynamic and tumultuous technology arena, instead of running to the press and politicians.

In a speech this morning, FCC chair Julius Genachowski outlined a proposal he hopes the other commissioners will approve at their December 21 meeting. The proposal, which comes more than a year after the FCC issued its Notice of Proposed Rule Making into “Preserving the Open Internet,” appears mostly to codify the “Four Principles” that were agreed to by all parties five years ago. Namely:

• No blocking of lawful data, websites, applications, services, or attached devices.
• Transparency. Consumers should know what the services and policies of their providers are, and what they mean.
• A prohibition of “unreasonable discrimination,” which essentially means service providers must offer their products at similar rates and terms to similarly situated customers.
• Importantly, broadband providers can manage their networks and use new technologies to provide fast, robust services. Also, there appears to be even more flexibility for wireless networks, though we don’t yet know the details.

(All the broad-brush concepts outlined today will need closer scrutiny when detailed language is unveiled, and as with every government regulation, implementation and enforcement can always yield unpredictable results. One also must worry about precedent and a new platform for future regulation. Even if today’s proposal isn’t too harmful, does the new framework open a regulatory can of worms?)

So, what appears to be off the table? Most of the worst proposals that have been flying around over the last year, like . . .

• Reclassification of broadband as an old “telecom service” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which could have pierced the no-government seal on the Internet in a very damaging way, unleashing all kinds of complex and antiquated rules on the modern Net.
• Price controls.
• Rigid nondiscrimination rules that would have barred important network technologies and business models.
• Bans of quality-of-service technologies and techniques (QoS), tiered pricing, or voluntary relationships between ISPs and content/application/service (CAS) providers.
• Open access mandates, requiring networks to share their assets.

Many of us have long questioned whether formal government action in this arena is necessary. The Internet ecosystem is healthy. It’s growing and generating an almost dizzying array of new products and services on diverse networks and devices. Communications networks are more open than ever. Facebook on your BlackBerry. Netflix on your iPad. Twitter on your TV. The oft-cited world broadband comparisons, which say the U.S. ranks 15h, or even 26th, are misleading. Those reports mostly measure household size, not broadband health. Using new data from Cisco, we estimate the U.S. generates and consumes more network traffic per user and per capita than any nation but South Korea. (Canada and the U.S. are about equal.) American Internet use is twice that of many nations we are told far outpace the U.S. in broadband. Heavy-handed regulation would have severely depressed investment and innovation in a vibrant industry. All for nothing.

Lots of smart lawyers doubt the FCC has the authority to issue even the relatively modest rules it outlined today. They’re probably right, and the question will no doubt be litigated (yet again), if Congress does not act first. But with Congress now divided politically, the case remains that Mr. Genachowski’s proposal is likely the near-term ceiling on regulation. Policy might get better than today’s proposal, but it’s not likely to get any worse. From what I see today, that’s a win for the Internet, and for the U.S. economy.

— Bret Swanson

Over the past few weeks it looked like the Administration had acknowledged economic reality (and bipartisan Capitol Hill criticism) and turned its focus to investment and jobs. Outgoing NEC Director Larry Summers and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a vast expansion of available wireless spectrum, and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski used his speech to the NARUC state regulators to encourage innovation and employment. Gone were mentions of the old priorities — intrusive new regulations such as Net Neutrality and Title II reclassification of modern broadband as an old telecom service. Finally, it appeared, an already healthy and vibrant Internet sector could stop worrying about these big new government impositions — and years of likely litigation — and get on with building the 21st century digital infrastructure.

But then came word at the end of last week that the FCC would indeed go ahead with its new Net Neutrality regs. Perhaps even issuing them on December 22, just as Congress and the nation take off for Christmas vacation [the FCC now says it will hold its meeting on December 15]. When even a rare  economic sunbeam is quickly clouded by yet more heavy-handedness from Washington, is it any wonder unemployment remains so high and growth so low?

Any number of people sympathetic to the economy’s and the Administration’s plight are trying to help. Last week David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed the way, at least in a broad strategic sense: “One Way to Trim the Deficit: Cultivate Growth.” Yes, economic growth! Remember that old concept? Economist and innovation expert Michael Mandel has suggested a new concept of “countercyclical regulatory policy.” The idea is to lighten regulatory burdens to boost growth in slow times and then, later, when the economy is moving full-steam ahead, apply more oversight to curb excesses. Right now, we should be lightening burdens, Mandel says, not imposing new ones:

it’s really a dumb move to monkey with the vibrant and growing communications sector when the rest of the economy is so weak. It’s as if you have two cars — one running, one in the repair shop — and you decide it’s a good time to rebuild the transmission of the car that actually works because you hear a few squeaks.

Apparently, FCC honchos met with interested parties this morning to discuss what comes next. Unfortunately, at a time when we need real growth, strong growth, exuberant growth! (as Mandel would say), the Administration appears to be saddling an economy-lifting reform (wireless spectrum expansion) with leaden regulation. What’s the point of new wireless spectrum if you massively devalue it with Net Neutrality, open access, and/or Title II?

One step forward, two steps back (ten steps back?) is not an exuberant growth and jobs strategy.

What we have here is “mission creep.” First, Net Neutrality was about an “open Internet” where no websites were blocked or degraded. But as soon as the whole industry agreed to these perfectly reasonable Open Web principles, Net Neutrality became an exercise in micromanagement of network technologies and broadband business plans. Now, Louderback wants to go even further and regulate prices. But there’s still more! He also wants to regulate the products that broadband providers can offer.

A Net Neutrality regime will not make the Internet more “open.” The Internet is already very open. More people create and access more content and applications than ever before. And with the existing Four Principles in place, the Internet will remain open. In fact, a Net Neutrality regime could close off large portions of the Internet for many consumers. By intruding in technical infrastructure decisions and discouraging investment, Net Neutrality could decrease network capacity, connectivity, and robustness; it could increase prices; it could slow the cycle of innovation; and thus shut the window to the Web on millions of consumers. Net Neutrality is not about openness. It is far more accurate to say it is about closing off experimentation, innovation, and opportunity.

Hooray. We live in a nation of laws and elected leaders, not a nation of unelected leaders making up rules for the rest of us as they go along, whether in response to besieging lobbyists or the latest bandwagon circling the block hauled by Washington’s permanent “public interest” community.

This was the reassuring message yesterday from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals aimed at the Federal Communications Commission. Bottom line: The FCC can abandon its ideological pursuit of the “net neutrality” bogeyman, and get on with making the world safe for the iPad.

The court ruled in considerable detail that there’s no statutory basis for the FCC’s ambition to annex the Internet, which has grown and thrived under nobody’s control.

. . .

So rather than focusing on new excuses to mess with network providers, the FCC should tackle two duties unambiguously before it: Figure out how to liberate the nation’s wireless spectrum (over which it has clear statutory authority) to flow to more market-oriented uses, whether broadband or broadcast, while also making sure taxpayers get adequately paid as the current system of licensed TV and radio spectrum inevitably evolves into something else.

Second: Under its media ownership hat, admit that such regulation, which inhibits the merger of TV stations with each other and with newspapers, is disastrously hindering our nation’s news-reporting resources and brands from reshaping themselves to meet the opportunities and challenges of the digital age. (Willy nilly, this would also help solve the spectrum problem as broadcasters voluntarily redeployed theirs to more profitable uses.)

Amazon’s Paul Misener gets all reasonable in his comments on the FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules:

With this win-win-win goal in mind, and consistent with the principle of maintaining an open Internet, Amazon respectfully suggests that the FCC’s proposed rules be extended to allow broadband Internet access service providers to favor some content so long as no harm is done to other content.

Importantly, we note that the Internet has long been interconnected with private networks and edge caches that enhance the performance of some Internet content in comparison with other Internet content, and that these performance improvements are paid for by some but not all providers of content.  The reason why these arrangements are acceptable from a public policy perspective is simple:  the performance of other content is not disfavored, i.e., other content is not harmed.

Later this week the FCC will accept the first round of comments in its “Open Internet” rule making, commonly known as Net Neutrality. Never mind that the Internet is already open and it was never strictly neutral. Openness and neutrality are two appealing buzzwords that serve as the basis for potentially far reaching new regulation of our most dynamic economic and cultural sector — the Internet.

I’ll comment on Net Neutrality from several angles over the coming days. But a terrific essay by Berkeley’s Jaron Lanier impelled me to begin by summarizing some of the big meta-arguments that have been swirling the last few years and which now broadly define the opposing sides in the Net Neutrality debate. After surveying these broad categories, I’ll get into the weeds on technology, business, and policy.

The thrust behind Net Neutrality is a view that the Internet should conform to a narrow set of technology and business “ideals” — “open,” “neutral,” “non-discriminatory.” Wonderful words. Often virtuous. But these aren’t the only traits important to economic and cultural systems. In fact, Net Neutrality sets up a false dichotomy — a manufactured war — between open and closed, collaborative versus commercial, free versus paid, content versus conduit. I’ve made a long list of the supposed opposing forces. Net Neutrality favors only one side of the table below. It seeks to cement in place one model of business and technology. It is intensely focused on the left-hand column and is either oblivious or hostile to the right-hand column. It thinks the right-hand items are either bad (prices) or assumes they appear magically (bandwidth).

We skeptics of Net Neutrality, on the other hand, do not favor one side or the other. We understand that there are virtues all around. Here’s how I put it on my blog last autumn:

Suggesting we can enjoy Google’s software innovations without the network innovations of AT&T, Verizon, and hundreds of service providers and technology suppliers is like saying that once Microsoft came along we no longer needed Intel.

No, Microsoft and Intel built upon each other in a virtuous interplay. Intel’s microprocessor and memory inventions set the stage for software innovation. Bill Gates exploited Intel’s newly abundant transistors by creating radically new software that empowered average businesspeople and consumers to engage with computers. The vast new PC market, in turn, dramatically expanded Intel’s markets and volumes and thus allowed it to invest in new designs and multi-billion dollar chip factories across the globe, driving Moore’s law and with it the digital revolution in all its manifestations.

Software and hardware. Bits and bandwidth. Content and conduit. These things are complementary. And yes, like yin and yang, often in tension and flux, but ultimately interdependent.

Likewise, we need the ability to charge for products and set prices so that capital can be rationally allocated and the hundreds of billions of dollars in network investment can occur. It is thus these hard prices that yield so many of the “free” consumer surplus advantages we all enjoy on the Web. No company or industry can capture all the value of the Web. Most of it comes to us as consumers. But companies and content creators need at least the ability to pursue business models that capture some portion of this value so they can not only survive but continually reinvest in the future. With a market moving so fast, with so many network and content models so uncertain during this epochal shift in media and communications, these content and conduit companies must be allowed to define their own products and set their own prices. We need to know what works, and what doesn’t.

When the “network layers” regulatory model, as it was then known, was first proposed back in 2003-04, my colleague George Gilder and I prepared testimony for the U.S. Senate. Although the layers model was little more than an academic notion, we thought then this would become the next big battle in Internet policy. We were right. Even though the “layers” proposal was (and is!) an ill-defined concept, the model we used to analyze what Net Neutrality would mean for networks and Web business models still applies. As we wrote in April of 2004:

Layering proponents . . . make a fundamental error. They ignore ever changing trade-offs between integration and modularization that are among the most profound and strategic decisions any company in any industry makes. They disavow Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen’s theorems that dictate when modularization, or “layering,” is advisable, and when integration is far more likely to yield success. For example, the separation of content and conduit—the notion that bandwidth providers should focus on delivering robust, high-speed connections while allowing hundreds of millions of professionals and amateurs to supply the content—is often a sound strategy. We have supported it from the beginning. But leading edge undershoot products (ones that are not yet good enough for the demands of the marketplace) like video-conferencing often require integration.

Over time, the digital and photonic technologies at the heart of the Internet lead to massive integration — of transistors, features, applications, even wavelengths of light onto fiber optic strands. This integration of computing and communications power flings creative power to the edges of the network. It shifts bottlenecks. Crystalline silicon and flawless fiber form the low-entropy substrate that carry the world’s high-entropy messages — news, opinions, new products, new services. But these feats are not automatic. They cannot be legislated or mandated. And just as innovation in the core of the network unleashes innovation at the edges, so too more content and creativity at the edge create the need for ever more capacity and capability in the core. The bottlenecks shift again. More data centers, better optical transmission and switching, new content delivery optimization, the move from cell towers to femtocell wireless architectures. There is no final state of equilibrium where one side can assume that the other is a stagnant utility, at least not in the foreseeable future.

I’ll be back with more analysis of the Net Neutrality debate, but for now I’ll let Jaron Lanier (whose book You Are Not a Gadget was published today) sum up the argument:

Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash—always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.

Actually, Silicon Valley is remarkably good at not making collectivization mistakes when our own fortunes are at stake. If you suggested that, say, Google, Apple and Microsoft should be merged so that all their engineers would be aggregated into a giant wiki-like project—well you’d be laughed out of Silicon Valley so fast you wouldn’t have time to tweet about it. Same would happen if you suggested to one of the big venture-capital firms that all the start-ups they are funding should be merged into a single collective operation.

But this is exactly the kind of mistake that’s happening with some of the most influential projects in our culture, and ultimately in our economy.