Net Neutrality

I participated in the Center for Management of Information Technology last week at the University of Virginia. It was a great session on the Consumerization of Technology and Enterprise Innovation. One of the presenters was Walter Mossberg, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His columns and blogs have a lot of power, some would say too much power, because a good review from Walt can send your products into the stratosphere, be a bad one will likely kill it.

I won't be disagreeing with him in this post, that will probably be next time, because the guy can be a lightening rod for stirring the debate. But he used a particularly good metaphor in describing net neutrality. He said that we should think of the Internet like the electrical grid and hair dryers. You plug in your hair dryer and turn it on and it just works. But imagine if someone wanted to the electrical grid to favor one hair dryer over another, and they were willing to pay to have, for example, the Acme hair dryer get a better level of power over the Bigco hair dryer. The power company says, 'Sure, when someone plugs in a Bigco, they'll get the regular power, but when someone plugs in an Acme, we'll give them the juice.'

That is what we're looking at with respect to net neutrality. Your HP laptop might work faster than the Macbook if HP worked out some agreement with Verizon and AT&T etc. Or of they all wanted to gang up on Netflix, they could choose to slow down the Netflix downloads, putting pressure on their business.

I think Mossberg's metaphor of the electrical grid and hair dryers is perfect for driving the point home.