Speakers Divided on Need for Revised Net Neutrality Rules

“The freedom of consumers to choose their own applications and defaults, one of the principles that the FCC had enshrined, … doesn’t actually happen on the mobile Internet,” Glueck said. Skyfire developed a downloadable, free mobile Web browser. “There’s a lot of uncertainty as an entrepreneur as to whether you can access an apps store,” Glueck said. His company, for example, hasn’t invested the millions of dollars it would cost to make a version of the application that would work on the iPhone, Glueck said. “It’s rather daunting as a CEO to think about taking that risk if some faceless individual within an apps store management committee can just say no."

Companies like Skyfire face other problems as well, Glueck said. “Ports are often blocked by carriers without notice,” he said. “Can you imagine trying to write an application if with some computers you couldn’t use the USB port and others you couldn’t use the serial port. Others you can’t use an Ethernet port, and it can all change without notice.” Carriers also sometimes decide to “throttle” some types of traffic “arbitrarily and without notice,” he said. Carriers frequently slow down video delivered through real time streaming protocol (RTSP), he said. “It is easily identifiable and there’s enormous growth in video traffic and an easy step to do is just find that that traffic takes two minutes to get through instead of seconds or milliseconds. This is very common practice. It’s not disclosed. It forces us to make all kinds of somersaults to use and find other protocols.” Skyfire developed its own protocol that’s faster than RTSP. “But then certain networks now are precluding any protocol but their preferred protocol,” he said.

The architecture of the Internet is complex and questions presented are complicated, said Marcus Weldon, Alcatel-Lucent chief technology officer. “Open means any access to any point by any users,” he said. “Openness is absolutely key. I'm not going to argue against openness. But it has to be affordable as well.” Network operators won’t invest in infrastructure if the costs are too high, he said. Weldon pointed to the explosive increase in the use of broadband. “So what’s the issue?” he asked. “The issue is this. Revenues aren’t growing like that and that’s problematic.” Weldon said one answer is allowing providers to offer different levels of service, so subscribers can pay for the amount of bandwidth they need.

Keeping the Internet open is critical, said Susie Kim Riley, CTO of Camiant. “The ability to actually try new applications, try lots of different things and put it out on the Internet and see what sticks, I think that has enabled the Internet to become very successful.” Nondiscrimination rules can have had a negative effect, Riley said. Rules that keep operators from keeping some applications off their networks inhibits developing tiers of service, she said. “Nondiscrimination basically means no” quality of service, she said. Network operators can’t be expected to keep adding capacity at no extra price, Riley said. “The economics just don’t work.”

The FCC must make clear what the rules will be for net neutrality, said Barbara van Schewick, a professor at Stanford Law School. “The current level of uncertainty dampens incentives to invest. I've seen that myself when I talk to network providers. They don’t do things that I think should be totally acceptable because they don’t really know whether someone would raise regulatory objections. I think there is a really, really important role for regulation to clarify where we draw the line.” The answer is “getting a good rule that differentiates the bad discrimination from the good,” she said.

Ajay Agarwal, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures, also asked the FCC to provide certainty on the rules going forward. “As mobile Internet becomes more and more open you're going to see increased investment,” he said. Regulation is a “risk” he factors into any investment decision, he said. “The more threat there is of regulatory uncertainty the more that gives us pause around putting dollars to work. Clearly, certainty and clarity around regulation, obviously openness and an open playing field, a level playing field, are from our standpoint absolutely critical to continue fostering innovation."

“Many of your decisions are going to be balancing acts and that means there’s going to be very few absolutes in this space,” predicted David Clark, a research scientist with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “The Internet is not absolutely neutral. The Internet is not absolutely open. The Internet is not absolutely being built for the benefit of the Internet service providers.”

World Wide Web Consortium Director Tim Berners-Lee said the Internet does need rules to operate properly as it has become more sophisticated. “I know that there are lots of systems that seem to run themselves, like the market economy, you know the government doesn’t have to intervene, but you know the government does have to stop you printing money,” he said. “There are some times when you have to have some rules.”