The Last Stand of an Utopian View: Net Neutrality

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"[IN the US] Both the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation are expected to review Net neutrality-related bills later this week."

In many countries (the UK is an exception) museums are not free: people pay to enjoy their culture. In many countries (the UK, again, is largely an exception), drivers pay tolls to use motorways. Sometime they can choose longer and slower but free routes instead, sometime they just have no alternative. In every country, people pay different rates for different postal services and for different flight routes. So why the Internet, whether you compare it to a motorway, to a museum, to ordinary mail or to aerial transports, should not be subject to the same usage-related rule? Users (read: companies) should be able to choose among ordinary (slower) and premium (faster) delivery services. What's wrong with this? Well, several things.
Many of the social and economic counter-arguments are rather well summarized in this article from the usual wikipedia, so I won't dwell on them here. Let me add just some further considerations.
First of all, it is not clear at all that the other services mentioned above are fairly priced. Does it really make sense to charge people for the usage of museums? If not, the same holds true for the net.
Second, the strength of some arguments may depend on which analogy one uses. People do not have access to faster or slower conversation over the telephone, for example. And they usually don't have to pay to access public libraries. Why should the net be any different?
Third, when one pays a toll on the motorway, whether the journey is speedy and comfortable is up to the driver and its vehicle, not the amount of money paid to enter the road. Likewise, how fast you download a file from the web or send an email may depend only on your IT, including the network you're using, not on a special fee you may be paying to buy a place in a fast-lane. Bandwidth and other technological limits are not in question, in "net neutrality" the central issue is the degree of latency controlled by a fee.
Finally, latency is a "bug" not a "feature" of the net, so any legislation that invites its economic exploitation runs the risks of tempting people to increase it rather than fighting. Consider the simple equation: more latency = more demand for faster services. Is it reasonable to expect that those in charge of the net will make much effort to improve it when the can profit from its slowness?


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