The FCC's net neutrality debate is irrelevant -- the Internet already has fast lanes

[Commentary] The debate surrounding the net neutrality vote at the Federal Communications Commission has been all about "fast lanes." Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says his proposal would prohibit them.

Critics on his left say that stronger rules are needed to prevent them. The FCC's Republican commissioners say that the specter of fast lanes is largely imaginary, and that net neutrality rules are a solution in search of a problem.

They're all wrong. Fast lanes are real. They exist now. And none of the rules the FCC proposed are going to prevent them.

So why is the FCC focusing on hypothetical fast lanes while ignoring the ones that already exist? One factor is inertia. Comcast's current business strategy, in which it charges almost everyone to deliver traffic to its own customers, only dates to about 2010. This kind of dispute wasn't even on the radar of policymakers when the term network neutrality was coined a decade ago.

So a lot of network neutrality advocates are still fighting the last war, not noticing that the open internet is coming under attack on a new front. The other reason is that regulating the terms of interconnection on the internet is even more complex than regulating classic network neutrality. It's relatively straightforward to say that a network provider can't prioritize one type of traffic over another on its network.

But writing rules to govern when two networks must connect with each other and how much they can charge is really difficult. So FCC policymakers may have decided to tackle the easier problem first.