The Hill editorial:
‘Net neutrality’ — no one even knows what that means
By Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas)

Ah totally don’t know what that means, but ah wont it.”
— Jessica Simpson

Maybe you heard Ms. Simpson deliver that line while poking fun at my drawl — oh, sure she was — in a recent commercial for satellite TV. Somewhat less attractive pitchmen use the same rationale for an idea they call “net neutrality.” They “wont” something, too.

Just don’t ask anybody to tell you what it is.

The Internet has gotten along without much neutrality since it was brought into the world by the National Science Foundation and the Pentagon 37 years ago. It was still a tiny information-sharing project when the private sector took over in 1995, and then the Internet exploded around the planet and into our lives.

The idea of government running the Internet again by requiring “neutrality” came up last year in the context of legislation to encourage entrepreneurs to put up the billions of dollars that are needed to make broadband available to every American home. To accomplish that goal, someone with great cash reserves would have to take a great commercial risk and build an enormous new infrastructure. They’d naturally anticipate that their investment would pay off.

It turns out that the people willing to sink billions into building the information superhighway also know how to construct a really fast Internet, and they were willing to do it because they recognized that some customers might pay extra for extra-fast.

From a consumer’s point of view, it would be like the daily choice between driving my old Ford Taurus or a sizzling new Ferrari. I’m not in the hot Ferrari because I can’t afford one, but my Ford gets me to work. Would I replace it with the Ferrari if I had an extra $100,000 burning a hole in my pocket? Maybe. But I don’t have that extra cash, and so I keep that Ford and drive it up to the speed limit. Mostly.

Some believe the government can do it better, however, and they propose to put all of us into an Internet version of something that is neither the quick and pricey Ferrari nor the reliable old Taurus. With the government in charge, average will replace fast as the goal, and we’ll all get the same, average car capable of the same, average speed.

There’s a catch, of course, and the catch is that the investors who have already risked billions on building the blazing-fast Internet of the future will simply pull out if they can’t construct both a highway for the Fords and a racetrack for the Ferraris, and then see if they can charge the Ferrari guys a little more for going 180 miles per hour.

Some say that’s not fair. I say it’s not only fair, it’s America, where inventive people can try their new ideas and profit from the ones that work, and customers get to choose what they want and buy what they choose instead of having federal officials choose on their behalf.

Today we have an Internet instead of a rudimentary information hookup because Congress resisted the natural temptation to throttle commercial investment and private innovation. If we’d stepped in early with massive regulation, there’d be no Google, no Amazon.com, no eBay and no kidding. Your ’84 Commodore-64 would be state-of-the-art, and the “services” would be delivered in bright words marching across a blue, five-inch screen. Camera shots of rush hour on I-95? Music from iTunes? Videos on YouTube? Forget about it.

As much as we love the good things that the Internet makes possible, everyone understands that freedom to innovate makes it what it is and will make it better. Why on earth would we want to use regulation to freeze it in place now? America is going to need a bigger, better, faster Internet to grow with people’s many different needs, not a slower, outdated, congested Internet.

Back in 1969, nobody knew the little DOD project would grow into the Internet, and today nobody knows what services that innovators will dream up to deliver, much less which ones that customers actually will prize enough to buy. I hope we can give both providers and customers a chance to find out before government steps in and decides for everybody.

Admittedly, “net neutrality” is a handsome turn of phrase. It was born in a flash of public relations genius last year, and from the intensity of the debate since then, you’d think net neutrality is more important than the Internet that it wants to protect. So, what is it, anyway?

You can’t regulate what you can’t define in law, so at a hearing last March, I asked a cross-section of people on several sides to define net neutrality. Here’s some of what they said:

Jerry Fritz of Allbritton Communications, for the National Association of Broadcasters — “Fortunately, we have no position and no definition.”

David Keefe, CEO of Atlantic Broadband — “Same for me, congressman. We are, you know, studying the issues and don’t have a position yet. I mean, we don’t practice any blocking in our company. I can tell you that.”

Paul Misener, vice president of Amazon.com — “I think fundamentally it is preventing the extension of market power over the network to market power over content…”

Timothy Regan, senior vice president of Corning Inc. — “…Consumers ought to be able to get access to the bandwidth they buy. They ought to be able to run the applications that they choose to run within the constraints of the plan they buy. They ought to be able to attach devices to their Internet connection that don’t cause harm to the network, and they ought to be able to go on the Internet where they want to go within the bounds of their service plan.”

Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO, National Cable & Telecommunications Association — “I guess my definition is that it is the first time regulation of the Internet will freeze investment and innovation.”

Walter McCormick, president and CEO of the U.S. Telecom Association — “Mr. Chairman, I would agree. We are dealing with what-if questions and hypotheticals, so I don’t have an effective definition of what is meant by (it).”

Kenneth Fellman, mayor of Arvada, Colo. — “The associations that I am representing have not come up with their own definition and some have not even taken a position on net neutrality...”

The blend of vague description and “beats-me” responses reflected state-of-the-art information on net neutrality as the debate was unfolding, so perhaps it isn’t a surprise that the proposal to write an indefinable idea into federal law and make it stick through bureaucratic enforcement wasn’t popular. It failed in the House by more than 100 votes.

Bad ideas don’t die, though, and nearly a year later, net neutrality is back. It’s still more a slogan than a policy, and nobody can define it any better now than they could then. When this bumper sticker comes around for reconsideration, it deserves to fail again for that reason alone.

Barton is the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

####