The hypocrisy of the anti-paid prioritization movement

[Commentary] In the network neutrality debate, much has been made about the “problem” of paid prioritization — where an ISP agrees to prioritize traffic from one source over another as part of a commercial exchange. Net neutrality advocates argue that paid prioritization violates the sacred rule of the Internet: that all bits should be treated equally. Yet few of these advocates have acknowledged the hypocrisy of arguing against paid prioritization among content providers without voicing the smallest of concerns about the same business model on the consumer end.

The technological reality is that if two different end users purchase two connections at different speeds, then traffic sent over the faster connection will be prioritized over traffic sent via the slower connection. This is true even if packets are treated almost equivalently from origin to destination. The reason is that “local access speed” is governed not by the capacity of the pipe but the rate at which traffic is released into it. Policymakers need to be careful when considering only one side of an argument in two-sided markets. If the Internet is truly an equalizing force, then no user group should be treated differently than any other. If it is acceptable to charge retail consumers different prices for different connection speeds, then it should also be acceptable to charge content creators different prices for different priority levels.

[Howell is general manager for the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation]