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My response to Keith Ellison’s Huffington Post op-ed

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Yesterday, U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, voiced his support for net neutrality and asked the Federal Communications Commission to implement rules that would protect Internet openness while ensuring that communities of color have a place at the digital table.

Mr. Ellison expressed concern that Internet service providers were in a position, by choosing to not treat traffic equally, to squelch the voices of minority communities on issues of particular importance such as the shooting this past summer in Ferguson, Missouri of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager.

Mr. Ellison is wrong on the issue.  There has never been equal treatment of traffic. From the early days of the Internet treatment of traffic has always depended on the type of traffic coming across the pipes.

As noted Internet pioneer Nicholas Negroponte recently noted, the idea of equal treatment of bits is “crazy.” A book is about one megabyte of data, yet one second of video represents more than one megabyte.

E-mail came to your computer a lot faster than video back in the early to late 1990s.  Remember buffering? Today that problem is resolved in part by providing the bandwidth necessary for moving video from the producer to the ISP and eventually to the consumer.
Mr. Ellison raises the big “if” when it comes to potential blocking or discrimination on the part of ISPs. The reality is that ISPs did not block the content provided by people on the ground in Ferguson. ISPs do not want to risk the value of their last-mile networks by sending competitors the signal that their networks are unreliable.

Ironically, that very video traffic that Mr. Ellison refers to would never get through to end-users unless backbone providers and ISPs agreed to the provision of greater bandwidth for video.

Mr. Ellison has simply made the anti-net neutrality argument.


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