In today's New York Times, Eric Pfanner suggests, in essence, that vibrant broadband competition can obviate the need for Net Neutrality per se.

In fact, it's basically axiomatic that widespread, effective competition -- of the sort that dominant ISPs have actively battled against in the U.S. for many years -- could minimize or perhaps even eliminate most net neutrality concerns.

But the history of the U.S. Internet includes such examples as ISPs cherry-picking deployments -- note that Verizon has now essentially ceased new geographical deployment of FiOS, explicitly saying that they will now concentrate on increasing market share in existing or already planned FiOS areas. This may be an entirely rational business decision on Verizon's part, but does nothing to help get fiber to currently unserved areas.

Other examples include ISP promises made to states or local governments for high speed deployments in exchange for legislative protection against municipally-owned Internet systems -- ISP deployments that often never appeared. Yet the same ISPs still proclaim that municipal systems would be unfair competition.

Few would argue against the proposition that effective competition of the sort available in other parts of the world -- and that means competitive in terms of performance and price, not just "simple" availability -- could render many net neutrality-related concerns moot.

But we're seeing consolidation in the U.S. ISP market in terms of major players, not the sort of competitive expansion that would be useful to most consumers. The Google fiber project will no doubt demonstrate technical feasibility, but getting from there to widespread deployments beyond relatively small test beds is an entirely different exercise.

Also -- and not mentioned by Pfanner -- the competition available in other parts of the world has in large part been enabled by direct government involvement, either in terms of basic broadband infrastructures or requirements for sharing of physical Internet access resources by competitors. These are both concepts that appear to be anathema to many in Congress and that trigger bogus (and well orchestrated, mostly "astroturf") screams of "government takeover of the Net!" or "government censorship of the Net!" whenever proposed for the U.S. telecom environment.

So it's not a question of whether or not we need real competition. We do.

The question is, how are we going to actually accomplish this?

--Lauren--