Today something very significant happened, but you could’ve missed it if you didn’t happen to read The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or PC Magazine. A group of Internet industry CEOs and Founders, myself included, came together to write a letter to U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Julius Genachowski, to express our support for his efforts around network neutrality.
Net neutrality is a cause that myself and OpenDNS as a company care deeply about. Before we came along and provided you with an alternative DNS service, everybody used their ISP or ran their own DNS server. Now we provide people with more choice and have demonstrated that a competitive DNS landscape is good for the Internet. It’s important that this competitive landscape be maintained and that network operators don’t do things that might cause them to block or prefer one type of traffic over another.
I urge you all to read the letter and get behind this great cause. I’ve embedded a copy of it below.
RichF
I for one don’t think it’s a great cause. The FCC is, once again, going to violate property rights for political reasons. ISPs have a right to do what they want with the part(s) of the net that they own and this right supersedes any fictional right to net neutrality.
posted on October 19th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
David Ulevitch, Founder
RichF — That’d be true if ISPs were in a competitive market. Unfortunately they are not. At best, most consumers have a duopoly to choose from.
ISPs used regulation and tax benefits to build out their infrastructure in the last mile, so that last mile needs to be neutral since we, the citizenry, paid for it.
When the day comes where ISPs are in a competitive market, I think you’ll find openeness being a key differentiator, and potentially even a premium people will pay for. Until then, things should be accessible equally.
And I’m not saying ISPs should be forced to peer with people, but once my bits hit their network, they need to be delivered with the same best-effort as other similarly classed traffic.
posted on October 19th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
TerjeP
I’m generally a fan of net neutrality. However one exception which has in my view been good for the Internet community is in regards to outbound connections to port 25 from home networks. A lot of ISPs routinely block such traffic unless the customer specifically requests otherwise. This has been great at helping to reducing spam from infected home PCs. These days RBL services such as the following make even this intervention unnecessary:-
http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/index.lasso
posted on October 19th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Alan
I used to be in favor of Network Neutrality enforcement and codifying it in law. But I’m not any longer. If “Network Neutrality” is limited to the concerns David mentioned above, then I’m all on board. But this only needs a simple rule-making or enforcement of rules that already exist.
I’m concerned that in the name of protecting people, Network Neutrality will create another bureaucracy to regulate it. That bureaucracy will take on a life of its own, and to justify its existence it will start looking for things to enforce and result in unwanted government regulation and intervention.
All I want is for the FCC to prevent ISPs from blocking applications on their networks and promoting competition in the marketplace. That’s what the FCC was created to do, and that’s what they should be doing. Nothing more.
posted on October 20th, 2009 at 7:20 pm