As the Journal wrote in its own editorial on Saturday:

Our own view is that the rules requiring traditional phone companies to connect these calls should be scrapped for everyone rather than extended to Google. In today’s telecom marketplace, where the overwhelming majority of phone customers have multiple carriers to choose from, these regulations are obsolete. But Google has set itself up for this political blowback.

Last week FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules for regulating Internet operators and gave assurances that “this is not about government regulation of the Internet.” But this dispute highlights the regulatory creep that net neutrality mandates make inevitable. Content providers like Google want to dabble in the phone business, while the phone companies want to sell services and applications.

The coming convergence will make it increasingly difficult to distinguish among providers of broadband pipes, network services and applications. Once net neutrality is unleashed, it’s hard to see how anything connected with the Internet will be safe from regulation.

Several years ago, all sides agreed to broad principles that prohibit blocking Web sites or applications. But I have argued that more detailed and formal regulations governing such a dynamic arena of technology and changing business models would stifle innovation.

Broadband to the home, office, and to a growing array of diverse mobile devices has been a rare bright spot in this dismal economy. Since net neutrality regulation was first proposed in early 2004, consumer bandwidth per capita in the U.S. grew to 3 megabits per second from just 262 kilobits per second, and monthly U.S. Internet traffic increased to two billion gigabytes from 170 million gigabytes — both 10-fold leaps. New wired and wireless innovations and services are booming.

All without net neutrality regulation.

The proposed FCC regulations could go well beyond the existing (and uncontroversial) non-blocking principles. A new “Fifth Principle,” if codified, could prohibit “discrimination” not just among applications and services but even at the level of data packets traversing the Net. But traffic management of packets is used across the Web to ensure robust service and security.

As network traffic, content, and outlets proliferate and diversify, Washington wants to apply rigid, top-down rules. But the network requirements of email and high-definition video are very different. Real time video conferencing requires more network rigor than stored content like YouTube videos. Wireless traffic patterns are more unpredictable than residential networks because cellphone users are, well, mobile. And the next generation of video cloud computing — what I call the exacloud — will impose the most severe constraints yet on network capacity and packet delay.

Or if you think entertainment unimportant, consider the implications for cybersecurity. The very network technologies that ensure a rich video experience are used to kill dangerous “botnets” and combat cybercrime.

And what about low-income consumers? If network service providers can’t partner with content companies, offer value-added services, or charge high-end users more money for consuming more bandwidth, low-end consumers will be forced to pay higher prices. Net neutrality would thus frustrate the Administration’s goal of 100% broadband.

Health care, energy, jobs, debt, and economic growth are rightly earning most of the policy attention these days. But regulation of the Net would undermine the key global platform that underlay better performance on each of these crucial economic matters. Washington may be bailing out every industry that doesn’t work, but that’s no reason to add new constraints to one that manifestly does.

— Bret Swanson

Here was my attempt, over at the Technology Liberation Front, to put this topic in perspective:

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Bandwidth, Storewidth, and Net Neutrality

Very happy to see the discussion over The Wall Street Journal’s Google/net neutrality story. Always good to see holes poked and the truth set free.

But let’s not allow the eruptions, backlashes, recriminations, and “debunkings” – This topic has been debunked. End of story. Over. Sit down! – obscure the still-fundamental issues. This is a terrific starting point for debate, not an end.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) and caching have always been a part of my analysis of the net neutrality debate. Here was testimony that George Gilder and I prepared for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing almost five years ago, in April 2004, where we predicted that a somewhat obscure new MCI “network layers” proposal, as it was then called, would be the next big communications policy issue. (At about the same time, my now-colleague Adam Thierer was also identifying this as an emerging issue/threat.)

Gilder and I tried to make the point that this “layers” — or network neutrality — proposal would, even if attractive in theory, be very difficult to define or implement. Networks are a dynamic realm of ever-shifting bottlenecks, where bandwidth, storage, caching, and peering, in the core, edge, and access, in the data center, on end-user devices, from the heavens and under the seas, constantly require new architectures, upgrades, and investments, thus triggering further cascades of hardware, software, and protocol changes elsewhere in this growing global web. It seemed to us at the time, ill-defined as it was, that this new policy proposal was probably a weapon for one group of Internet companies, with one type of business model, to bludgeon another set of Internet companies with a different business model. 

We wrote extensively about storage, caching, and content delivery networks in the pages of the Gilder Technology Report, first laying out the big conceptual issues in a 1999 article, “The Antediluvian Paradigm.” [Correction: "The Post-Diluvian Paradigm"] Gilder coined a word for this nexus of storage and bandwidth: Storewidth. Gilder and I even hosted a conference, also dubbed “Storewidth,” dedicated to these storage, memory, and content delivery network technologies. See, for instance, this press release for the 2001 conference with all the big players in the field, including Akamai, EMC, Network Appliance, Mirror Image, and one Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of . . . Novell. In 2002, Google’s Larry Page spoke, as did Jay Adelson, founder of the big data-center-network-peering company Equinix, Yahoo!, and many of the big network and content companies.

This interplay between bandwidth, storage, and latency, caching, content, and conduit, was the very point of the conference. What are the technical and economic trade-offs? Where will the Net be modular? And where will it be integrated? Where will content be stored, and who will pay? In many ways, the conference was ahead of its time. And my humble view is that Schmidt and Page may have even adopted some of the key insights of these conferences and turned them into some of Google’s most successful applications and architectures. A talk by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter in particular, I remember, seemed to have a profound impact on the way attendees visualized this coming “cloud” that would enable the death of the desktop. Remember, at the time, Google was still just a search engine company that hosted its then-thousands of servers in the data centers of Equinix and a few other hosting companies. Today, Google, with its global cloud platform and desktop killing apps, has become the supreme storewidth company.

I offer this background because some of us have been thinking about these topics for a (relatively) long time. When we first began analyzing this new “network layers” and then “network neutrality” policy concept five or more years ago, we did so with these profound architectural questions in mind. The Net, and the bits and applications traversing it, moves so fast, that we need all these technical solutions — routing, switching, QoS, CDNs, etc. — to make it work, let alone make it fast and robust.  

So yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story was not noteworthy for exposing some brand new network technology or architectural scheme. No, it seemed noteworthy (again, pending the accuracy of the reporting and the follow-on assertions) because (1) it highlighted the reality of this already existing architecture — something a few of us have been trying for years to expose and highlight as a shortcoming of the neutrality concept — and (2) suggested Google and others were softening their stance on the net neutrality policy issue. 

Now it’s perfectly possible the article is mistaken, that no one is softening on the push for net neutrality regulation. Let’s have the truth, indeed. But it is a good thing that we are getting deeper into the technology and architecture of the Net because a clearer understanding will expose net neutrality’s big flaws. As Gilder and I surmised five years ago, net neutrality, as ill-defined as it still is after all this time, seems one group’s attempt to get the upper hand on competitors using the heavy hand of government. My networks, good; your networks, bad. My content delivery bandwidth-saving latency-reducing fix, good; your content-delivery bandwidth-saving latency-reducing method, “evil.”

More to come. . . .

Correction: The issue of the Gilder Technology Report I referred to was of course titled “The Post-Diluvian Paradigm.” The meaning of this title was that after the flood of bandwidth — or capacity — was deployed, we would still need latency- and hop-reducing and other performance-enhancing technologies and architectures to make the cloud function robustly.

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

What some innocuously call “equal network access,” others call meddlesome regulation. Net neutrality could potentially provide a platform for Congress and the FCC to micromanage everything on the Net, from wires and switches to applications and services to the bits and bytes themselves. It is a potentially monstrous threat to dynamic innovation on the fast-growing Net, where experimentation still reigns. 

But now Google, a newly powerful force in Washington and Obamaland, may be reversing course 180-degrees. The regulatory threat level may have just dropped from orange to yellow.

Update: Richard Bennett expertly comments here.