Reductio ad absurdium… Name for me one successful musician who is using BitTorrent to profit from the distribution of their own materials. And Timbo, earning a little extra beer money doesn’t count. I’m talking meaningful revenue.

Count me as agnostic on NN, but you’re sure not going to convince anybody of your position with such trite and demonstrably false nonsensical arguments. BitTorrent CAN be used for this I suppose, but it’s overwhelmingly and indisputably used to STEAL creators content (movies, games, songs, music, tv shows, etc.)

Incidentally, your persuasiveness as the great defender of creators rights is further challenged by your founders’ nut job anti-capitalist views (e.g. “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”) Yeah, I can just see those creators wanting to earn some serious Benjies for their hard work doing backflips for THAT kind of system!

All we can go on today is by way of today’s regulations, no? And Title II of the Communications Act does not deem ISP’s as common carriers. You can’t regulate realities of today based on the infrastructure of yesterday. That doesn’t make any sense.

I appreciate your response. And your concerns. So, what if prioritization was with the user’s consent? What if *I* wanted to stream a Netflix movie in HD and guarantee quality (and NetFlix wanted to be able to do that)? Or what if *I* wanted to play XBox Live (online) and have no problems with lag (and XBox wanted to be able to provide that)? (I do!) Is prioritization still unacceptable? If so, doesn’t that make the FCC a gatekeeper getting in between the edges to prevent users and content providers from connecting in ways that help both of them?

So, with the new net neutrality rules, if Comcast was caught doing that, they would be forced to stop. Without the new net neutrality rules, if Comcast was caught doing that….well, they stopped.

Problem solved. If it happens again, the FTC and/or FCC have tools to address any harmful or anti-competitive behavior. Chairman Genachowski has said they believe they have the tools they need to address any problems.

So, this is purely prophylactic regulation. (Don’t take my word for it. That’s what Eric Schmidt has said).

While I appreciate and share an interest in preventing genuinely harmful or anti-competitive behavior on the internet – and I would oppose any ISP who actually tried to block lawful content that REM wanted to distribute and a user wanted to access – it seems to me that the net neutrality rules go well beyond that. In fact, you appear to want to actually prevent REM (or any other musician) from being able to access (voluntarily!) enhanced services that both the content provider AND user would want.

So, how do you reconcile regulations *prohibiting* musicians and users from having access to voluntary & harmless services with the idea that net neutrality is about internet freedom?

(For the record, I have no strong opinions about REM, so I’ll leave that to you guys to battle out. Perhaps we should put out an NPRM to decide that matter.)

I’ll try, but this is by no means a comprehensive attempt. One concern is not necessarily that network owners will outright block specific artists (though they could), but that they will prioritize content owned by, affiliated with, or paying premiums to the network owner

Your response to that may be “so what,” on any number of levels, and I don’t have time to discuss all of those points now. Some people would like to think, however, that the Internet enables us to get away from control by gatekeeepers and, to some extent, makes for a more democratic (small “d,” of course) marketplace of ideas. I.e., one in which Digital Society’s content can be just as easily accessible as the Wall Street Journal’s.

As I said, there’s too much to unpack here at the moment, at least for my feeble brain, and I may just need to go and disappear from the thread. But I don’t think the sinister scenarios you ask about are either all that sinister nor all that far-fetched.

This isn’t just a “solution in search of a problem.” It happened. Net Neutrality rules would prevent it from happening again, keeping control over the Internet in the hands of those who use it.

Yes, it happened. And Comcast, almost immediately, bowed to public pressure to apply different standards to regulate traffic across the network. They acknowledged that throttling based on protocol was not a workable solution and they began looking at other alternatives. Have they ever throttled iTunes? You hold up OK Go as a model of artists endangered by a web without your regulations. Yet their distribution model is one that allows monetization of an artists content. If this was about blocking access to artists because they don’t have a record label, why isn’t iTunes being blocked?

The courts did deem ISPs as common carriers, to use your terminology. Or to be more precise, the FCC long regulated dial-up internet access as a common carrier service, although its regs did not reach ISPs such as Earthlink, etc.

The problem arose when network owners like cable companies and telcos started acting as ISPs too, meaning that they owned the networks *and* provided the enhanced services/information services (like e-mail, website hosting, what have you) that ride over those networks.

At that point, the FCC decided to regulate the such “facilities-based” providers’ services as information services, while still recognizing the undeniable telecommunications component undergirding the offering.

In Brand X, the Supreme Court said that the FCC’s decision in that regard was reasonable enough. It did not say in Brand X that it was inevitable, or that the FCC couldn’t have used its discretion to come out the other way.

Nick is absolutely right. ISPs were never considered common carrier, the phone lines used to connect to them were. The service you accessed over those phones was always an information service. It was the cable industry moving those services away from dial up that broke the grip of government regulation and fueled the explosive growth of broadband. Had cable been regulated as the phone company was, under the same “what if” theories net neut fans employ, you could easily argue that we’d all still be on slow dial up.

With regard to the AT&T/Pearl Jam issue, that was acknowledged freely by AT&T as a mistake made during a live broadcast. Unless you are arguing that the government can now tell me what I can and cannot air on my own website, that’s not a net neutrality violation. I’m not aware of anyone who would claim that AT&T, even had it been done on purpose, is not free to control their own content.

The “public interest” as you call it gets complicated rather quickly when the discussion turns to what can and cannot be done with private networks. Since there is no “Internet” outside a collection of interconnection standards and agreements, it’s not quite as cut and dry as you would have us believe. If you want to get into a discussion of ratepayer subsidized networks versus networks funded by private capital, we can do that. If you want to suggest that companies have some obligation to a higher cause that is both vague and undefined, so the government can simply take their property or force them to use it in a way that runs contrary to their own interests, we can go down that road, too. The history of “takings” and government abuse is long and distinguished. However, to suggest you are on the side of public interest, only because you claim to be, is to pretend that a substantial backload of case law is unavailable to help you navigate the issue.

Your argument that net neutrality has any connection to record labels is also disingenuous. You argue it’s impossible to succeed without net neutrality, but net neutrality has no impact on whether there are or aren’t any record labels. Both could exist quite easily without the other.

Finally, the suggestion that AT&T and Verizon don’t make this possible is simply laughable. There are two parts to any Internet transaction – content and access. I recognize a need for both. Your claim is that only one is needed. That is easy enough to demonstrate as completely false. Without the network that was built by telecom and cable companies, you would be unable to access content. Without companies like eBay, Google, etc, there would be precious little to find on the Internet. That alone is one of the key points of contention that I and many others have with so-called “net neutrality” laws. There is nothing neutral about them. They assume, as you do, that all innovation takes place at the edge and none takes place at the core.

I’m also not sure why you and Tim continue to make this assumption that my position on the issue has anything to do with Arts & Labs. As I have stated, I am not compensated by Arts and Labs for anything I say in this space. In fact, if you’d like to visit my personal blog, you can find my thoughts on this topic as posted for the past five years. As my wife will attest, that blog has never made me a dime either. :-)

That one is pretty easy.

Comcast blocked file sharing via BitTorrent and other applications. Musicians use BitTorrent and other file sharing applications to control and profit from the distribution of their own materials. It takes away the middleman role once occupied by labels and creates a new world where musicians have near complete control over their creations.

They would suffer in a world where their ISP can throttle and block the tools that they need to run successful online businesses.

This isn’t just a “solution in search of a problem.” It happened. Net Neutrality rules would prevent it from happening again, keeping control over the Internet in the hands of those who use it.