Net Neutrality’s not anti-property, it’s about our property

Net Neutrality's not anti-property, it's about our property
by: Ken Fisher

It took 17 rounds, but when the FCC's $4.638 billion reserve was met late last week, it meant that the FCC's mandated open access rules would necessarily come into play. Under the proposed rules, 22MHz of the spectrum to be auctioned would be subject to open-access regulations, meaning that the company winning the auction would not be able to control what kind of devices are attached to the network or how the bandwidth is used.

While there were plenty of high-fives around here, not everyone is pleased. Scott Cleland, founder of telecom analyst firm The Precursor Group, is out blasting the developments, saying that open access and "net neutrality" advocates are "antiproperty" according to the IDG News Service. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Everybody throws the word 'open' around and says open is wonderful," Cleland said. "But 'open' means communal. It means not owned."

Mr. Cleland is of course wrong on the most fundamental of levels. Open means open, not communal. Check a dictionary. When Verizon "opens" its network this year, it's certainly not giving up complete and utter ownership of its network.

Second, Net Neutrality advocates are not ipso facto "antiproperty," because if they were, they wouldn't care whether or not their own devices (aka, property) were locked into proprietary networks and/or designed to only work with specific technologies. Net neutrality proponents simply want their property to work like it should.

What has brought this situation to light is nothing short than the collective abuses of the American wireless user, who is frankly sick of having choice determined by carrier lock-in and having "features" determined by committee. The rhetoric of property is apropos here, in the way that carriers can sometimes treat their subscribers like they own them. Compare your cell phone service to your cable TV service. Both are, ultimately, powering expensive pieces of technology you own, but taking your television to another cable company is magnitudes easier than taking your cell phone to another carrier.

To be sure, "open" access won't mean free access or that whoever owns a chunk of open spectrum can't make money. It simply means that making such services worth paying for will require a lot more than traditional carrier lock-in. At the very least, it marks the beginning of an age when our mobile telecommunications property has value and functionality less constrained by arbitrary sets of rules from on high. And to hear Verizon tell the tale, their dramatic swing from opposing the notion of "open access" networks to wanting to build one themselves was partially the result of coming to grips with market forces in a competitive environment. It certainly had nothing to do with "not owning" a network. It was quite the opposite: Verizon realized that the best kind of network to own is the open kind.

View the original blog entry here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080203-net-neutralitys-not-anti-property-its-about-our-property.html