Network Neutrality

The contrast couldn't have been more stark — at one end of the U.S., the high-tech industry was showing off everything that can come to the American home in the next few years in the form of new services and technologies, while at the other, lawmakers were coming together to make it harder for all of that to happen.

In other words, what the Consumer Electronics Show gives, a Democratic-controlled Congress is prepared to take away.

Of course, it isn't as simple as that — no sweeping legislation ever is. But there is a definite connection between technology and investment: The best of ideas needs money to make it to market. And there is a definite connection between investment and regulation; too much of the latter will stifle the former.

And without major investment in network infrastructure, to probably include rebuilding metro networks with carrier Ethernet, the ability of today's Internet to deliver all the video services being developed to connect to all the devices that crowded the floor at CES in Las Vegas is suspect at best.

Do any of the senators who signed the Snowe-Dorgan bill seeking to mandate Net neutrality understand the meaning of jitter or latency?

Who exactly is expected to pay the billions required to keep the Internet pipes flowing freely, not just in the access networks where consumers have paid for broadband services but also in the metro and backbone networks? Traditionally, that job falls to the ISPs, the largest of which are today's telephone and cable operators.

But if Snowe-Dorgan becomes law, it could prohibit those same ISPs from charging more in order to deliver the network capacity and the quality of service required to support the massive requirements of enabling video to show up on every screen in the U.S. If that happens, investors are going to be hesitant to pony up the billions needed to buttress the network.

At the end of the day, someone has to pay. Net neutrality proponents can brag about saving the Internet all they want, but that rhetoric won't cut it on Wall Street. The shiny new technology that lit up Vegas for CES requires broadband connections, and that means billions in network investment — and no legislation is going to change that.