Martin Geddes argues against Net neutrality.

Price discrimination is a good thing, he says. It’s good you can save some money by buying your airline tickets in advance.

And there is no moral right to Net neutrality.

“The Internet isn’t sacred.” So there’s no reason to worship the Net as it currently stands.

Net neutrality also doesn’t stand up as a practical issue. The telcos will be able to get around it because there are so many ways to get around it, from obscure terms and conditions to setting defaults. “You’re fighting the telcos on their natural ground, lobbying.”

It would be a benefit to consumers to let them access an only-local network that gives them p2p access to neighbors. Or maybe we do want a network that lets Google subsidize delivery, e.g., they subsidize the 10mb download of Google video to consumers who have only bought 2mb connections.

The current network, he says, is not neutral. It has beliefs embedded in it. E.g., the Internet address space doesn’t respect country values, which is a value. And it doesn’t let you trace back to the individual, only to the ISP.

He does concede that there’s a free speech issue.

The Net neutrality harms people at the bottom of the economic scale because it disallows price discrimination. E.g., suppose the cheap account only gives you access to Yahoo or MSN, etc. [There’s a difference between discriminating on the cost of bandwidth for accessing an open network and discriminating based on what you can access. The latter distorts the open market for innovation.]

We need to focus on innovation on pricing, financing and purchasing of networks, he says. We cannot now easily allow a community to create its own.

David Isenberg: Well, that was provocative!

Tim Wu: Were the attachment rules a mistake? (= the rule that you are allowed to attach whatever device you want to the phone network)

Martin: No, because there was no competition.

Tim: Do you think the broadband market is competititive?

Martin: No, it’s not. But network neutrality takes you away from alternative funding models.

Tim: So you want the Internet to look more like cell phone networks.

Martin: No. It should be able to do price discrimination but if the Net market were competitive, that would constrain the price discrimination.

[Tags: f2c martin_geddes net_neutrality]

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