In today's New York Times, the editorial board comes out in favor of Network Neutrality legislation.

This comes on the heels of three Senate Commerce Committee hearings discussing Net Neutrality, Municipal Broadband, and video franchising. These intertwined issues are just a few of the topics under consideration as a part of the 1996 Telecom Act rewrite.

Sasha gave me the heads-up about this article in the Times about AOL & Yahoo’s plan to create a “tier” for email service. The plan would allow companies to pay a premium to get their mail to your inbox in a more reliable manner, bypassing these companies’ spam filters.

Today Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly weighs in on the matter, highlighting that it may be another front in the network neutrality war.

But, I’m not too concerned about this – not nearly as concerned as I am about the telco’s plans to create a tiered Internet.

Why?

There are many natural resources endowed to us at birth… air, water, fossil fuels, and spectrum.

Spectrum?

What’s that you say? It’s the airwaves. It’s the natural resource that brings light to our eyes and radio to our cars. It’s the medium used to take x-rays, run your cell phone, and bring the Internet to your wireless laptop.

It’s a unique natural resource in the sense that it cannot be depleted. But certain technical limitations (i.e. interference) means it must be used with some level of oversight, so as to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Advances in technology may overcome this limitation, but we’re not quite there yet. Hence its regulation by the FCC.

All spectrum isn’t created equal. Some spectrum is good for one purpose, but not for another. You can cook a frozen burrito using microwaves or gamma rays, but I wouldn’t recommend the latter.

Similarly, certain spectral regions are better suited for transporting digital information. The spectrum used by over-the-air (broadcast) television stations is perhaps the most valuable, as the physical characteristics of this region of spectrum make it much more practical to transmit signals through buildings, hills, trees, and other objects that might block a higher frequency signal.

Some estimates put the value of the TV-band spectrum at nearly one trillion dollars. But how much does the FCC charge TV station owners for use of this resource?

Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, zero. And it doesn’t end there. The law also mandates that privately owned cable systems carry the signals of all local broadcast stations, vastly increasing their audience.

All the Congress mandates in return, is that the broadcasters act in the “public interest”. Ah, but the students of free speech out there will recognize the difficulty in actually ensuring this happens.

So let me ask you, should home shopping count as public interest programming? …

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

But unless Congress and the FCC act to protect it, the Internet as we know it will cease to exist.

Regional monopoly incumbents such as Verizon and BellSouth are pushing to create a new kind of Internet – one where the content of big media companies get priority, while smaller content providers are segregated to their own Internet ghetto...