Laws prohibiting broadband providers from blocking or slowing
service to competing Web sites or online applications would amount
to government-sanctioned property theft, speakers said Thursday at
a conservative think-tank forum.
Speakers affiliated with Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF),
promoting its own bill to deregulate broadband providers,
criticized net neutrality bills, which would prohibit broadband
providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from blocking or
slowing services to competing services such as VOIP (voice over
Internet Protocol).
"There's nothing neutral about net neutrality," said Jeffrey
Eisenach, chairman of the consulting firm CapAnalysis Group LLC and
co-founder of PFF. "Net neutrality is, in fact, the theft of
property rights from [broadband] infrastructure providers. It's
simple regulatory theft -- the transfer of ownership from one group
of people to another group of people."
A net neutrality law isn't needed because large broadband providers
haven't discriminated against competing Web content, added Kyle
McSlarrow, president and chief executive officer of the National
Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), a trade group for
cable television and broadband providers.
Many U.S. residents will soon have more broadband options,
including Wi-Fi networks and broadband over power lines, allowing
them to switch services, he said. "They're about to have a lot more
choices around the corner," McSlarrow said.
Proponents of a net neutrality law, including Internet companies
such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., say broadband providers will be
tempted to discriminate against competing products without some
regulation. BellSouth Corp. has proposed charging Internet
companies extra to deliver faster customer access to their Web
sites or applications, saying it needs to find new ways to pay for
improvements to its broadband networks. Net neutrality proponents
say such a business plan would create an Internet with toll
booths.
Also, broadband providers today have few competitors -- about half
of all U.S. residents have the choice of two broadband providers,
and the rest have one or none, said Gigi Sohn, president and
cofounder of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group.
"If we're in a situation in the future where we're talking about
four or five [competitors], maybe we don't need to talk about net
neutrality," she said. "We are so far from having
competition."
PFF is pushing a bill, called the Digital Age Communications Act or
DACA, that would deregulate telecom providers and take away most
U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authority to create
forward-looking rules for the telecom industry. The bill, largely
written by PFF in 2005, would limit the FCC on net neutrality
issues to investigating consumer complaints about unfair
competitive practices.
Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, introduced
DACA in December. On the other side, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon
Democrat, on March 2 introduced a bill requiring net neutrality and
Democrats in the House of Representatives are pushing for net
neutrality provisions to be included in a House telecom reform
bill.
Sohn, the lone advocate of net neutrality on the PFF forum panel,
called DACA's language allowing the FCC to investigation unfair
competition "vague." She called on Congress to create some limited
rules so broadband providers and customers know what to
expect.
"They're just two different visions of the Internet," Sohn said. "I
see the Internet as something that gives people the power, for the
first time ever, to have a megaphone. These guys want to make a
closed system."
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