I am not going to say the sky is falling, but as likely as not — it is. At least as far as Net Neutrality is concerned. For the uninformed, Net Neutrality is the principle that ISPs should provide the same level of service for all websites. That means that whether I am streaming video from YouTube or searching the Small Business Associations website I can expect the same speed, at least as far as my service provider is concerned.

Courts have ruled against the idea of Net Neutrality and have decided instead to leave the entire thing in the hands of “market forces”.

Net Neutrality

I am never one to hamper the progress of Capitalism, but I believe this decision made by the Justice Department is the result of a serious misunderstanding of what promotes growth in the net economy. They seem to believe that by giving ISPs the same powers to control service speed that they do the Postal Service, that this will somehow promote the growth of better backbone networks.

What they don’t seem to realize is that tiered pricing may be one of the reasons that mail is being displaced by UPS, FedEX and yes even email. If ISPs decide that their video content should have priority over their competition, for example, what is the incentive of future video aggregaters of trying to move into the space? They will always been slower than the ISPs offerings.

Web 2.0 Roundup

The battle for Net Neutrality isn’t over yet, but this is a serious loss for web service providers. The ISPs have been trying to get the ability to throttle traffic for years now, and now that they have it is difficult to tell which, if any, will launch the first attack against the competitive landscape.

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