Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) is about to jump into the net neutrality fray. Although ISPs limiting users' access to certain content, like BitTorrent video transfers, under the guise of "reasonable network management" has gotten more press lately, there's another issue to look at.
Here's a very brief excerpt from the article at Reuters
By Peter Kaplan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress may have to stop broadband Internet providers from charging content providers higher fees for priority access to the Internet, a senior House of Representatives Democrat said on Tuesday.
"I am concerned that if Congress stands by and does nothing, we will soon find ourselves living in a world where those who pay, can play (on the Internet), but those who don't are simply out of luck," Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said.
This is almost the reverse of the issue that we've covered so heavily. As opposed to limiting a customer's ability to access someone's content they're limiting a company's ability to distribute the content by way of higher service fees. Does it make sense that ISPs would want to charge a higher rate to businesses because they're more likely to use a lot of bandwidth? Sure. But unless it is made very clear how that pricing is determined we could run into trouble. If it's settled on as a pay-by-usage syste, like your water or electric bill, then they'd get the (implied) desired effect of limiting the ability of competing companies (like companies who provide competing video on demand content, for instance) from distributing their content. If a suit was filed the ISP could very easily say "Hey, we make it very clear that businesses pay $xxx for xxxMB of access each month. We couldn't care less what they're using the bandwidth for." and be reasonably safe.
Either way, we're still in potentially dangerous territory. We're still trying to regulate how public companies provide access to public space. If there's anything that walks the tightrope between what is and isn't within the Government's jurisdiction, I think this is it.
Hopefully, the Government and the ISPs can keep the best interest of the public in mind while they work it out.
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