Wednesday Evening Links > John Dvorak: Net Neutrality issue is crap

For the past couple years, everyone's been talking about net neutrality and how important it is. Is it really more important than the pressing issues of poor rural Internet access, DNS attacks, spam, bots, snooping, and virus writers?

That's a rhetorical question. In fact, net neutrality is crap. I say this partially because there is no real definition of "net neutrality." When I see a buzzword with a nebulous definition, I suspect a ruse.

Ask anyone who is all jacked up about net neutrality, and you'll get a kind of Jay Leno "Jaywalking" answer: "It's, like, so the net, man. It's, like, even-steven for, like, everyone, so it's not, like, unfair to anyone or a rip-off, man." Or "We don't want, like, anyone messing with the net just to make more money, dude."

We hear that the new FCC director, Julius Genachowski, is a big proponent of net neutrality. I hope he asks himself what exactly it is, and whether we can cope with it in some way that does not involve regulating the Internet. While I think a lot of things need regulation, I am not a fan of regulating the Internet in any way until it becomes so problematic that we must regulate it to fix some horrible situation. In the meantime, why don't we expend our energy fighting bot attacks, DNS attacks, hackers, viruses?