What the heck is “net neutrality” anyhow?

[Commentary] The root of network neutrality is the fear that we’re getting a raw deal on Internet service. This fear -- grounded in the fact that it’s more expensive to build a network that covers a dispersed population than to cover one that lives in high-rise buildings -- is combined with a theory about network design and network quality that’s fundamentally defective.

Network neutrality advocates believe that broadband information networks are very, very simple, somewhat like the water system. All it takes to supply a city with water is a well, a pump, and some pipes, so hooking the city up to the Internet should just be about some wires, some switches, and a little bit of electricity. The wires may break from time to time, but when that happens you just patch ‘em up and it all works like magic. It would be great if things were really like that, but they simply aren’t. Broadband is like a water system that pumps fifty percent more water each year to each home for the same price. That would be pretty hard for most water systems to do unless they were massively overbuilt to begin with.

[Bennett is a visiting fellow at AEI]