Mega-corps and Net Neutrality

Joelle Tessler of the AP: "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC's authority to impose such "Net neutrality" obligations on broadband providers."

I don't argue the legal merit if this ruling. Under the current law, the FCC was reaching outside of it's jurisdiction. This situation is a symptom of a greater problem. As we move more towards a world of mega-corporations, we will find that companies have more and more conflicts of interest.

Let's use Comcast as an example. They provide home and business internet services. They also provide home cable and telephone services. Add to this mix the fact that they own CN8, Comcast SportsNet, SportsNet New York, MLB Network, Comcast Sports Southeast/Charter Sports Southeast, E! Entertainment, Style Network, G4/Tech TV, Versus, The Golf Channel, AZN Television, FEARnet, NHL Network, Exercise TV, NBC Universal, Philadelphia 76ers, Philadelphia Flyers and more.

When a company of Comcast's size has divisions that come into conflict, it is the parent company's job to determine priority. This priority will not necessarily be what's best for the individual customer. It will be what's best for the overall bottom line. This means that the small customer of the internet division may lose out in favor of the financial gains in the television or film division.

Comcast uses bandwidth as the excuse to kill Bit Torrent, claiming that it just slows down the network for other customers. If bandwidth really is the issue, they should ban MMPORPGs and online film/television viewing. These are also huge bandwidth hogs. Oh wait. They have money invested in those areas and would lose out. Hmmm... so it has nothing to with bandwidth in the end does it? It's about money. In addition to legitimate traffic, Bit Torrent is the most common form of piracy. They don't want to lose out on the money they think is being pirated from them. They also don't care if those legitimate users get hurt in the process.

Congress is currently entertaining a law that will give the FCC the authority to enforce Net Neutrality. I support this. I believe in absolute Net Neutrality. It's the only way to ensure freedom of the press and to ensure that whistle blowers have the freedom to expose wrongs done. Yes, this means some improper conduct will be allowed. If I have to choose between a few MP3 downloads getting stopped or the Free Iran movement being able to keep us updated, I will pick the Free Iran folks every time.

My ideal solution would be to ban companies from getting into these conflict of interest situations in the first place, but that is highly unlikely. As long as we are going to have corporations that have internal conflicts of interest, we need to give an outside power the ability to ensure that those conflicts are resolved in the favor of the consumer.