[ NNSquad ] Comments by American Consumer Institute

[Brett Glass <nnsquad@brettglass.com>]

Worth reading -- the American Consumer Institute has filed some 
excellent comments with the FCC outlining the various positions on 
"Network Neutrality."


Network Management Facts and the Tragedy of the Commons
American Consumer Institute "ConsumerGram"

The debate over elements of the Net Neutrality (NN) policy platform 
promoted by a handful of advocacy groups is now focused on what 
techniques, if any, Internet service providers (ISPs) should be 
permitted to use for the purpose of managing congestion over their 
private networks.  This ConsumerGram provides a set of facts on 
which there seems to be no reasonable basis for disagreement, shows 
how these facts are important in resolving the network management 
debate,  reviews the main elements of the positions of the 
contending parties, and offers a consumer welfare perspective on 
the issues and their possible resolution. This ConsumerGram shows 
that, ignoring the facts on net management can lead to the wrong 
conclusions and policies that ultimately reduce economic benefits 
for the vast majority of online consumers.

Issues to Be Resolved

A coalition of advocates united by concerns about threats they 
perceive to NN recently petitioned the Federal Communications 
Commission (FCC) to find unlawful Comcast's interference with 
selected peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet traffic.  The interference 
involved applications enabled by P2P protocol that permit users to 
exchange large files including high resolution movies and other 
bandwidth intensive content, but requires so much bandwidth that it 
can slow down all traffic on the network.  Comcast claims the right 
to manage its network and asks the FCC to declare that its 
practices are reasonable and fully consistent with the FCC's 
Broadband Policy Statement.  Dozens of parties commented on the 
petition and what follows summarizes some of the main positions and 
their implications for consumers.

More at:

http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi?native_or_pdf=pdf&id_document=6519870280