Listening to the panelists on the Net Neutrality panel at the IEEE Summit on Internet Governance, I cannot help myself for the impression I get. Being both an engineer and a having business education, both sides are understood, but the different arguments are fundamentally different and my perception just got clearer.
An engineer, and there are plenty in the room, would argument, if the net cannot carry the required capacity, we need to build out the network. There are approaches through engineering, to solve congesting control and buffer bloat, but also to improve routing and to build out physical capacity.
The business argument is, we need to regulate what is there already. We need to define the services available on the net today, categorizing what may be public utility, and what may be necessary for business. This way would allow better overall quality for everybody.
The former allows for “permission-less innovation”, anybody on the net to innovate. The later would just do what is used as an argument: limit the existing network.