Political not technical
I think this article, and Martin Geddes' position, misses the point. There is no point criticising the technical solutions until there is agreement on the public policy goals and the barriers to achieving them.
Net neutrality is about ensuring that end users have open access to all the services they require, without gatekeepers (either ISPs or existing service providers) distorting that for commercial purposes. The public policy goals are primarily to make sure: i) the barriers to entry for new services are kept as low as possible, and ii) pricing (either from the ISP or the service provider) is not used to distort the market.
If we agree on the main goals, the question becomes how to achieve them. Ideally. maybe, these goals could be achieved by regulation of commercial arrangements. However, experience tell us that that doesn't work well: companies want to keep contracts, and even conversations, secret for commercial reasons; pricing can be manipulated in non-transparent ways; cartels can appear even in the heaviest regulated industries; etc.
So, we end up falling back on regulating things that can be measured. Mostly technical.
So the technical discussion shouldn't be about whether the technical rules are "right" but whether they are the rules most likely to influence actions of key players in the direction desired by public policy. I wish Geddes would put his considerable experience and expertise towards that problem and suggest better technical rules to achieve the public policy goals.
This is a particular need in telecoms, where regulators are mostly captured by the big players and need all the help they can get.
[Unfortunately I have to post this as AC as I work for a major telecom provider and they would not appreciate me expressing my own views on this topic.]
Biting the hand that feeds IT
