At Broadcasting & Cable, Mark McKinnon and Mike McCurry write about the FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for net neutrality, and particularly the barriers it could impose to digital commerce and creative rights.
The proposed bar on customized services, which are common throughout the U.S. economy, is especially puzzling given that the Commission's own Broadband Task Force has publicly observed that different Internet applications have different quality of service requirements. Some require substantial bandwidth, others are latency sensitive, and still others are dependent on speed. Increasingly, creators of applications, software and other online content are partnering with network operators in the early stages of development to better match capabilities and needs. The proposed rules would choke off this beneficial trend.Read the whole thing here.
Such rules also would effectively cripple the creative industry's ability to compete with "free" content by offering consumers a higher quality experience. The creative community is actively experimenting with new business models, including free advertising-supported content, subscription-based content, streaming content, downloaded content, and pay-per-view content, that aim to provide consumers the content they want, when they want it while also providing content creators the continued incentive to invest in new movies, new music and other types of entertainment that consumers want. However, the distribution of multimedia content over the Internet is still in its infancy. The potential rule would foreclose options by government fiat, limiting the services available to consumers and curtailing the creation of new content by eliminating potential revenue sources to fund it.
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