Net Neutrality: We Need a Better Deal

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s new proposal for Net Neutrality rules include effectively abolishing it: proposing preferential treatment for certain traffic.

In the wake of February’s Netflix and Comcast deal, it becomes obvious that only companies willing to pay for access have traffic worthy of preferential treatment. The open Internet has been paywalled shut. This is by its very definition discrimination.

We have fundamentally wronged the Internet. The FCC is regulating what code did not. The architecture of the Internet is not built for 21st century content consumption.

But now many smart researchers are already thinking about this problem. Broadly speaking, this re-imagined Internet is often called Content Centric Networking.

The closest working example we have to a Content Centric Network today is BitTorrent. What if heavy bandwidth users, say, Netflix, for example, worked more like BitTorrent? If they did, each stream -- each piece of content -- would have a unique address, and would be streamed peer-to-peer.

That means that Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses -- from addresses all across the Internet. To the ISP, they are simply zeroes and ones. All equal.

[Klinker is CEO BitTorrent]