WHEN the Federal Communications Commission meets on Monday at Harvard University to investigate
The idea behind Net neutrality is simple: Decisions about what information should move over the Internet most expeditiously should not be made by those who benefit financially from those decisions. The companies that provide the bulk of the nation's Internet connectivity should not be allowed to decide that, for example, YouTube videos are less important than their own Hollywood blockbusters. They should not be allowed to skew the market in favor of large companies by charging for delivering their bits faster than those of a start-up. Net neutrality is basic to keeping the Internet the greatest seedbed of innovation in history.
Comcast has gained FCC focus because it seems to have been blocking the Internet service BitTorrent, which is useful for downloading large files. But what's at stake isn't simply the value of BitTorrent. Rather, it is a struggle between two visions of the Internet.
Comcast and the other major Internet access providers see the Internet as a way to broadcast content to users. Its value comes from what is on the Net. This suits the providers, who come from the world of telephones and cable TV, and are structured to make money by selling content and services to subscribers.
The other vision, and the one that has brought a billion people onto the Net and has stirred hope around the world, says the value of the Net comes from who is on the Net. The "who" isn't a solitary face; the "who" is us, together. The most exciting developments on the Internet have been about how we are connecting with one another, touching one another, and building ideas, services, and new social forms together.
In the first vision, it makes sense to optimize the Internet for delivery of the most commercially attractive content. Apparently, Comcast thinks BitTorrent isn't important.
In the second vision, it makes sense to connect as many people as possible and let them - us - decide what we want to do with this connectedness. Optimizing for one use de-optimizes for other uses, so the second vision says that providers shouldn't discriminate among the bits.
Comcast says it has to violate Net neutrality because traffic on the Internet is exceeding Comcast's capacity. That betrays Comcast's old world view of the Net. There are other ways to "shape traffic," as the providers euphemistically put it. Already they offer tiered service, allowing those with more money to have more bandwidth.
The providers could go further. For example, why not let users decide if they want five particular sites to have priority, and let them change those sites every month? That way, users could decide whether Hollywood movies, YouTube, or World of Warcraft is their priority, rather than having an economically motivated corporation decide for them.
But here's a better idea: How about if the access industry delivered on its promise to connect all of America's neighborhoods, to keep us competitive? The French, for example, get multiples of US bandwidth at a fraction of the cost. Letting carriers violate Net neutrality actually gives them an incentive to keep bandwidth low: By keeping bandwidth inadequate, the carriers give customers a reason to pay the carriers extra for adequate delivery.
An Internet delivered by a tiny handful of old-technology providers, even if constrained by Net neutrality, doesn't get us to the second vision. It doesn't give us access laid like a blanket over the entire country, rich and poor alike. It doesn't give us a Net that we make together, rather than a Net the contents of which we consume.
For that, we need more than Net neutrality. We need a structural change.
We gave the incumbent providers their chance. They have failed. The FCC could decide to once again require them to act as wholesalers to local Internet Service Providers, which would offer genuine competition on price, access, reliability, services, and whatever other differentiators an open market would devise.
We have to have Net neutrality, but we should not settle for it.
David Weinberger is a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center.
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