Hill Times Letter: Disagree with Goldberg’s ‘spin’ on net-neutrality

Letter to the Hill Times Editor published March 26, 2007

Re: “Beware the ‘peoples’ republic of ‘net neutrality,’ says Goldberg,” (The Hill Times, by Mark Goldberg, p. 11, March 12).

Mark Goldberg tries to spin the ‘net neutrality’ issue with the common incumbent industry misinformation. The best way to understand the need for neutrality is to compare our transportation and communications infrastructure, given they mirror many of the same issues.

If we built roads the way that Goldberg proposes, my driveway would connect to a private toll road that is vertically integrated with some unrelated aspect of the economy.

If we built communications networks the way I believe we should, we would have a communications infrastructure utility that is separate from any specific product or service someone would want to connect to. I would have a single very-high-speed connection at my home (example: fiber), and be able to on-demand connect to multiple voice (legacy telephone), multimedia (legacy cable, digital radio, etc), data (legacy ISP), or other services as desired.

Switching between voice, multimedia, data or other service providers should be as easy as it is for me to choose to travel to one store versus another in today’s neutral transportation networks. It should be just as easy to connect directly to the home of someone else in Ottawa, or to a government service, as it is any specific commercial service.

I suspect the current ‘cable’ companies would no longer be required, given I will be able to directly subscribe to CBC, CTV, BBC, City, and other such networks that are offered over the Ottawa municipal network directly, only hiring an intermediary when I wanted to pull in stations not offered locally.

Not only are the incumbent service providers in North America not a useful path for rolling out future services, but we need to wrestle this critical infrastructure out of the hands of existing telecommunications and cable companies.

Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.
(The letter writer is an internet consultant.)