A Hippocratic oath for the Internet?

So how can this be? How can a company like YouTube emerge and prosper, much less survive, when broadband access providers—unrestrained by regulatory mandates—can simply cut off YouTube from its customers? Because in the absence of regulation, pro-investment, pro-competition policies have created a market where it is essentially impossible for a carrier to deny consumers access to the content and services they want.

Most American consumers have a choice from among two fixed-line and four wireless broadband providers, as well as emerging new entrants such as Clearwire. Not only do wireless networks offer speeds and services that are reasonable substitutes for fixed offerings, but switching services from one provider to another is essentially a friction-free transaction. A Verizon customer can walk into an Apple store (and vice versa) and walk out 20 minutes later with a new device, a new contract and new mobile broadband services.

In this competitive environment, it is essentially impossible for carriers to create anti-competitive barriers between consumers and the content and services they want. It’s just too easy for consumers to switch to providers that don’t put up such barriers. Now, this is not to say that carriers may not seek comparative advantage by having exclusive arrangements with certain content, equipment, or services. These sorts of exclusive arrangements are not only common across consumer industries (e.g. the NFL Sunday Ticket exclusively on satellite), but they create wholesome incentives for investment and innovation (iPhone begets Blackberry Storm begets iPhone 3G begets Droid etc., etc.).

Rather than allow competitive carriers to invest and innovate in a way that they believe will best serve their customers, proponents of net neutrality would have

Network-management practices and arms length negotiations between unaffiliated businesses subject to some Washington-based special interest driven regulatory standard of “reasonableness.”

Once network and other investments are tested by politically driven regulatory standards rather than dispassionate technical and economic evaluations, the value of the innovative lawyer or lobbyist quickly outstrips the value of the innovative network engineer or software developer.

So, by all means lets work together to address gaps in Broadband coverage and access where they exist. In that regard the FCC’s recently released National Broadband Plan has some good ideas (freeing up additional spectrum and reforming Universal Service subsidies, for example). But first (in the manner of the physicians oath) let us commit to do no harm to the wider Internet economy that has been built on a foundation regulatory restraint, competition, and innovation.

John Kneuer is the President and Founder of Kneuer LLC. From 2003-2007, Mr. Kneuer served first as the Deputy Assistant Secretary, and then as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information. As Assistant Secretary, Mr. Kneuer was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the principal advisor to the president on telecommunications policy, and the Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.