Although he called net neutrality "crypto-nationalization," blogger and telecom guru Martin Geddes at times suggested that net neutrality would be too little rather than too much.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 11, 2006]

Martin Geddes now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, but he lived for several surreal years in Kansas City (both Missouri and Kansas), while he was trying to persuade Sprint to build a genuine mobile application portal. His experience as a consultant and business planner gives him a unique, dollars and sense perspective on the issue of net neutrality.

He has already written up his speech to the Freedom to Connect conference on his aptly named blog, Telepocalypse. The speech was called "Neutrality, Shmootrality" and Geddes seemed to see himself as a contrarian presence at a conference filled with proponents of limiting monopoly power.

Pricing
Geddes does believe that the Bells should be allowed to sell anything they can imagine, including closed, sponsored internet service, for example:

I will concede that there's a free speech issue. But to speak you need access at affordable prices, just like before to write you needed to have access to a printing press. If Yahoo! wanted to do a $10/month bundle deal with SBC where you could only access Yahoo! content, and consumers buy it, where's the problem? Outlawing it hurts the most price-sensitive (read: poorest) customers.

On the other hand, he does note that the Bells often hide the actual cost of services, and at the conference he suggested something that is not being talked about in the U.S. He suggested that rules specify how an ISP can describe the cost of its service. All too often, the headline price on the TV advertisement doesn't include taxes, fees, and other charges. The BroadbandReports website contains extensive documentation of good and bad ISP practices.

The real problems customers face, Geddes noted, are that "they're not sure what they're getting because it's not disclosed in advance. The TOS is obscure, and many aren't sure what they're allowed to do. The credit card industry has a standard way of displaying the APR. We could control the use of terms in the ISP industry, with specific definitions for full internet access as opposed to restricted."

Although this proposal was both radical and practical, it attracted little attention.

Philosophy
Anyone (myself included) who thought Geddes was pro-monopoly would have been comfortably disabused by his speech, in which he compared the effectiveness of net neutrality to offering morphine to a cancer patient.

Geddes said that those who want an end to monopoly power need to take on that monopoly directly. "There are laws; they just aren't enforced," he said. "The issue is getting the FTC, not the FCC, to take on the issue."

Instituting net neutrality would use government power to redress the problem in a way that might not solve it. "The internet isn't a thing. It's a mesh of agreements. Do you want to modify millions and millions of contracts post hoc? It surprises me how many people who were opposed to the recent Supreme Court decision concerning eminent domain, Kelo v. New London, want to set this precedent on the internet."

In fact, there are good things happening. Geddes noted:

We need models that better align the interests of network owners and users. This involves moving away from the feudal model of telecom and move to a new funding model that captures the positive externalities from a broader pool of beneficiaries. We need a "third way" other than monopoly and crypto-nationalization via unbundling and price controls.

In his summary, Geddes said that the policy of the U.S. government should be to learn about and encourage innovations such as WISPs, municipal networks, and energy company fiber that are providing alternatives to the monopolies.

— End