The latest political wisdom, arising from the results of the mid-terms, is that net neutrality as an issue hurt those who supported it. That combines with the Democratic loss to create a loss of momentum—at least according to popular wisdom. Actually, net neutrality never had any momentum. The Congress doesn’t like to intervene in telecom because problems there are too easily created and too hard to fix. That’s why we have an FCC. When there’s a problem with FCC authority, Congress is inclined to stand by and let them do their best, as I think they’ve intended here all along. That the problem is getting more complicated by things like the Fox/Cablevision brouhaha is only making “becoming a tree” a more attractive option to our leaders on the Hill. The FCC closed comments on this, and they’ll no doubt issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at some point, but don’t expect magic.
One of the complications is illustrated in Australia, where the boundaries between the new NBN, a public access network intended to provide good broadband by bypassing the commercial process and the national carrier (Telstra), and Telstra. NBN now wants to get into inter-city transport, creating a backhaul network that would link metro broadband customers to the Internet by hauling them between cities to get to a big on-ramp. At one level it’s not a serious issue; that type of traffic is often not particularly profitable. On the other hand, it illustrates that when politics gets involved in broadband, the normal political tendency to build one’s own empire rolls over into the broadband space. Does NBN’s head (Quigley, formerly of Alcatel-Lucent) see himself as the czar of Australian broadband, and perhaps even of networking? Minister of Networks? Aside from the fact that this sort of thing would devalue the investment of millions of Australians who bought into Telstra’s privatization with the encouragement of the government, it raises the question of how far NBN will really go, and how much taxpayers will have to kick in.
Worldwide, the tension between consumers/voters who want everything for nothing and businesses who want something for everything isn’t going to be resolved through government ownership. If transport/connection isn’t profitable we need to figure out how to achieve public policy goals within the framework of networking today, because dismantling that framework at this point is simply not possible. If broadband was a good business, VCs would be fighting over the carcass as we speak. Instead, they’ve long since gotten out of Dodge. Think about it.