John Conyers, husband of the hysterical Detroit councilwoman who was publicly smacked-down by an elementary school student recently for failing to think before speaking, has re-introduced the worst net neutrality bill ever:
The bill’s introduction comes on the heels of a hearing earlier this week about a Net neutrality proposal in a competing House panel, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which traditionally engaged in turf battles with the Judiciary Committee over certain matters.
The trouble with these anti-prioritization bills is their failure to align with the way the Internet actually works, as well as with the way it needs to work in the future. Prioritization makes it possible for one network to support many different uses, and that’s an increasingly important feature as we try to consolidate all of our communications networks onto one infrastructure. And prioritization is also how to get per-user fairness on a network that doesn’t have any by design.
In the realm of networks, then, prioritization is necessary to preserve American values. Now why doesn’t Conyers get that?
Here’s the text of the bill from the last session. This is the worst part:
(b) If a broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, it must prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin or ownership of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or enhanced quality of service.
This sort of nonsense makes the Internet inhospitable for voice and video-conferencing services.
Does Conyers want to strangle the Internet because it has embarrassed his wife by making her theatrics viewable around the world? It wouldn’t be utterly paranoid to think so.
UPDATE: See George Ou’s blog for a nice summary of the arguments that net neutrality critics such as yours truly have made over the last couple of years on the subject of prioritization, including all of my favorite quotes.
This is the equivalent of saying that a company can’t choose to distinguish itself from competitors by offering expedited shipping (e.g. “3 day select” for the price of ground shipping). While the “neuts” call this “pay to play” and “discrimination” that will be done by the big guys, in fact it’s the little guys and new entrants who are at least as likely to do it.
It seems to me that all this meddling with the networks will only serve to inhibit new technologies. Increasing government regulation does this. Just look at all the new technologies that cannot happen or don’t work correctly because of the DMCA. What we need to focus on is de-regulating the monopoly phone & cable companies. Removing that shell of protection will cause a firestorm of competition, lower prices and improve service quality.