Comcast Won’t Violate Net Neutrality, COO Says

Telecom News Editorials Reports Glossary

7:10 am on September 27, 2006 | Category: Business, Telecom Services, Internet, Regulation, Editorials

Comcast’s chief operating officer, Stephen Burke, said last week that the cable giant has no intentions of prioritizing the traffic on its data networks, and that he sees no purpose in the ongoing debate over net neutrality laws.

Limiting customers’ ability to visit the websites they want would be the single stupidest thing that Comcast or any other ISP could do, Burke said.

Many internet providers, however, including AT&T Inc., seem to think differently, claiming that they have a right to bribe internet content providers and moderate traffic accordingly. This effectively means that whichever high-bandwidth websites (i.e. Google, MySpace, Youtube, etc.) paid the biggest bribes would be the most easily accessible to users.

This kind of multi-tiered internet has met with significant disapproval from most major web-based companies, as well as the majority of well-informed web users. Numerous pieces of legislation have been proposed in the U.S. Congress, but most have failed to make much headway.

In a way, of course, Mr. Burke has a very valid point. By interfering with web content, ISPs will create a hailstorm of consumer complaints, quite possibly resulting in lost customers. In that way, net neutrality is a self-regulating principle, and self-regulation is always preferable to interference from the government.

For this issue to “take car of itself,” however, mainstream internet users will need to become more informed about the principle of net neutrality and how it is being threatened. So long as this issue remains at the forefront of consumer consciousness, the free and unhampered internet will likely be able resist violation.