Internet Law 2006

Brooklyn Law School

Professor Wendy Seltzer, email wendy.seltzer@brooklaw.edu
Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

Network Neutrality

November 30, 2006

End-to-End Arguments in System Design, J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark (1981)
Network Neutrality; Speed bumps on the information highway, Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, June 18, 2006
Broadband Internet Regulation and Access: Background and Issues, Congressional Research Service (2006)
Browse Save the Internet and Hands Off the Internet
Read ONE of the pieces of proposed legislation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality#Congress
- Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, S. 2360, Ron Wyden, March 2, 2006 PDF
- Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, H.R. 5252, Joe Barton, March 30, 2006, PDF
- Network Neutrality Act of 2006, H.R. 5273, Ed Markey, April 3, 2006, PDF
- Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006, S. 2686, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, May 1, 2006, PDF
- Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006, J.R. 5417, Jim Sensenbrenner and John Conyers, May 18, 2006, PDF
- Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006, S. 2917, introduced by Sens. Olympia Snowe and Byron Dorgan, May 19, 2006, PDF

For further reading (optional):

David Isenberg, The Rise of the Stupid Network (1997), available at http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html
Barbara van Schewick, Towards an Economic Framework for Network Neutrality Regulation, 5 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. (forthcoming 2007), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=812991
Tim Wu, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination, 2 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. 141 (2003) http://ssrn.com/abstract=388863
Chris Yoo, Beyond Network Neutrality, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (2005), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=742404

Reading Notes

For much of the Internet's early history, "neutrality" or non-discrimination has been the default. If you paid for an Internet connection, you got equivalent access to all online producers, from major media outlets to individual videobloggers. As we've seen, that environment spawned widespread creative, technical, and economic innovation.

In November 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre gave an interview to Business Week:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

That interview and other industry comment sparked concern that network providers would begin discriminatory pricing, in turn prompting some to propose legislation or regulation forbidding discrimination.

Do we need regulation to keep the Net open and free (as in speech), or will regulation hinder broadband investment? If we regulate what should that regulation look like?