Today, the FCC held its en banc meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The focus of the hearing was the agency’s network management proceeding, and much of the discussion focused on the net regulation bill recently introduced in the House by Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Markey told the audience and commissioners that the FCC should oversee network management practices to ensure that they are employed only as a temporary solution until bandwidth catches up with demand and to be sure that they are “reasonable” and “non-discriminatory.” Others at the FCC meeting understood the need for traffic management, suggesting that rather than regulating management practices, Congress and the FCC should encourage more robust competition in broadband networks. Many, including FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, also suggested that transparency in traffic management practices would be valuable to consumers.
With respect to Rep. Markey’s remarks, however, he’s got it wrong. In spite of the substantial investment network operators are making—$70 billion dollars in North America in 2007—higher capacity alone can’t mitigate the need for network management, just like wider streets don’t mitigate the need for stop lights or traffic laws.
Just consider the transition from dial-up to broadband: sure, bandwidth increased exponentially, but that new bandwidth brought with it new applications, like video, VoIP, online gaming, file-sharing, and more. Bigger, better, faster broadband networks will lead to new innovation in applications that will soak up that capacity; that’s a good thing for consumers, who will have an array of new content and applications to choose from, but those networks will need to be managed to operate at peak performance.
Congress and the FCC certainly can’t forsee what management practices will be necessary, efficient, effective, and satisfactory to consumers; if they could, they’d be making a pretty penny running networks of their own! The lasting solutions will emerge from industry cooperation, through industry forums and Internet standards bodies, and by communication between ISPs and app producers; content providers and service providers are already actively working together to improve the network efficiency of P2P protocols to reduce network congestion. Continuing that kind of inter-industry collaboration will lead to the most lasting, effective solutions; regulation of the Internet, on the other hand, will chill investment and could very well stand in the way of traffic management solutions that make the Internet work better for all of us.
