When I blogged something positive about Net Neutrality, Seth Finkelstein wanted to know what the alternative was to letting the carriers decide which packets to block, if there is genuine Net traffic congestion.

David Isenberg and Harold Feld have each responded not only in comments to my post, but more fully on their own sites. I like David and Harold’s approaches better than my own hasty and, well, dumb response. (A while ago I’d posted an idea I heard somewhere that I like: The carriers could let users nominate particular sites for especially speedy interaction, limiting the number of times a user could switch in a month. So, if you want to play WoW but don’t care about downloading on-demand movies, you could choose some WoW sites for your express lane, but I could choose on-demand this month and next month decide I’d like really fast P2P video. Or whatever.)

(FWIW, David lists me among those who conflate copyright and congestion. I’m not sure how I gave David that impression. I understand that AT&T’s intention to filter copyrighted material is different from the carriers’ contention that network congestion requires them to filter packets.) [Tags: net_neutrality david_isenberg harold_feld seth_finkelstein att ]

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