It is Too Soon to impose Net Neutrality

IT IS TOO SOON TO IMPOSE NET NEUTRALITY
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: John Gapper]
[Commentary] Central control of the Internet need not go hand-in-hand with increased download speeds. Regulators can prevent the obvious abuses and the blanket imposition of a net neutrality rule immediately would have unpredictable consequences. The first priority for the US is to push enough investment into fibre-optic lines to create the kind of high-speed Internet that is becoming widespread in countries across Asia and Europe. Despite some of the rhetoric, the Internet already has slower and faster lanes. Companies such as Ebay and Google plug into it through big pipes and store their data on servers around the world so that their pages load more rapidly. Telecoms companies exchange traffic in order to make it travel faster than it would through the public hubs that were the foundation of the Internet. The “best efforts” nature of Internet architecture ­ all packets of data are delivered as fast as they can be with no discrimination ­ also works better for some applications than others. It does not matter too much if an e-mail is delayed by a split second or a photograph takes a fraction longer to load. But videos and films fare less well under these egalitarian rules. They may run jerkily or freeze if too much data is delayed. The best approach is to give the telecom companies some leeway on net neutrality now and watch to see the results over the next few years. They have promised not to block any Internet applications and services and to ensure that all traffic is delivered as fast tomorrow as it is today. But this is only a start: to merit their newfound freedom, they must do a great deal better than that.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0c39e582-d866-11da-9715-0000779e2340.html
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