The hypocrisy of neutrality

I received an interesting email this week from Randy Fuller, director of strategic marketing officer at Tekelec, a telecoms software provider. He was recapping the news that three of Europe’s largest telecoms operators had held a summit with the European Union (EU) to discuss targets to improve broadband speeds across the continent by 2020. As we know, serious capital investment on behalf of the operators is required if the EU is to achieve its targets.

The operators would argue that in order to pay for this initiative they would need to develop new business models to generate the revenues needed to finance broadband network construction. However, many of these models would be in direct conflict with the decision by the Dutch parliament to introduce net neutrality legislation, a move that could have drastic consequences for mobile operators.

Fuller pointed out that although the regulators’ intentions to provide universal access to high-speed broadband are good, any decision to impose net neutrality is not in the best interests of the end-user. The emotional argument behind net neutrality may seem fair, but it will inevitably lead to the degradation of the very service that the EU is striving to open up. Network innovation would be stifled considerably by a restrictive policy that would permit the non-discrimination of traffic, and leave the operators incapable of meeting future broadband needs. Spot on, Randy!

According to Fuller, The Insider and almost all network operators spoken to, net neutrality will lead to a situation where the quality of a subscriber’s broadband experience would be dependent on the state of network congestion, with a small minority of bandwidth-hungry subscribers able to exhaust network resources at the expense of the remaining majority. In the long term, net neutrality would preclude the introduction of new, and innovative, services that would serve to improve the subscriber experience, generate investment for network construction and benefit customers, content providers and operators. Operators would be unable to offer service tiers that would allow them to differentiate themselves in an already crowded and saturated marketplace and customers could choose the level of service they desire, with the associated price plans.

Ultimately telecoms regulation in the EU will need to strike a fine balance between open access and market innovation. If the EU is to achieve its broadband targets then it will need to grant the operators the freedom to innovate and offer subscribers a range of choices, and better services.

In Asia, however, there is little talk of ‘net neutrality’ legislation. No surprising with the level of internet filtering currently being undertaken by governments and by service providers at the insistence of governments.

Some operators in the region are even offering services with tremendous market potential and humanitarian value that would be ‘illegal’ under net neutrality rules being imposed in the USA and mooted for Europe. For example, Singapore multi-play operator, StarHub, will soon be making available Singapore’s first network-based mobile internet filtering service to complement its existing broadband Internet filtering service. Parents will be able to use both of these services to better protect their children from objectionable online content.

Admirable - yes, net neutral – probably not! Shaping, restricting, throttling, enhancing, filtering or manipulating of internet access in any way, (unless you are a government it seems) will be a no-no. Isn’t it time the public were made aware of the negatives? Or do communications service providers have such a bad reputation, no one will care or even listen?