FCC Looks for Balance in Net Neutrality Debate

“Comcast and other network providers have asserted the right to determine what content consumers can access and how they can access it,” Ammori said.

Harold Feld, senior vice president of Media Access Project, was more militant. “Comcast lied,” he said. “Comcast lied repeatedly about what it was doing. They lied when their customers asked them point blank whether they were interfering with their attempts to use their broadband connection. There is no other business in the United States where we let companies lie.”

Then he answered. “There should be some limits because in the best case where companies are genuinely trying to deliver the best experience for their subscribers, what we will have is a homogenized Internet with no room for innovation,” he said. “At worst, there is the threat of real anti-competitive behavior…then we will lose the vibrant free-speech engine that has revolutionized this election cycle and how we interact with each other.”

Feld went so far as to say there also should be limits on profits. “So in the rush to maximize profit they do not run over our free speech, our right to innovate and our natural desire to find the next new and big thing that is going to change all our lives.”

Toning down the rhetoric, Ken Ferree, president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation said that one point beyond debate is that network resources are limited. “We can’t all use the Internet all the time for all applications. So the question is not whether there will be some kind of traffic management, but what that traffic management might be,” Ferree said. “One option is apparently that [the Internet] is a free for all and whoever is first on can use the Internet as much as they want for as long as they want and the rest of the world be damned.”

The other might be metered use where those who demand large amounts of network resources pay for them. “That is an area I would have no objection to. It might work, but at this point there has been very little consumer testing and it is not clear if the market will accept that form of traffic management. But that may be where this all ends up,” Ferree said.