Twenty-five years ago, when I arrived at Stanford to begin studying for my Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, there was no Internet. It was called the ARPAnet, and it had just undergone a radical switch from the outdated “Network Control Protocol” to the newfangled “TCP/IP”, which is now lingua franca of the Internet. As I studied, I followed the network’s trials and tribulations — including its initial meltdown due to overuse for file transfers — and participated in a Stanford project whose goal was to develop digital radios. This work, along with work done across the Bay at Berkeley, was eventually integrated by NCR into a product called WaveLAN, the granddaddy of the Wi-Fi radios we all have in our notebook computers today.

After staying in Palo Alto for several more years, I moved to Laramie, Wyo., where I started the world’s first wireless broadband Internet provider. That provider, LARIAT, has been going strong for 16 years, providing Internet service to rural areas that the cable and telephone companies won’t deign to serve. There are now between 4,000 and 8,000 small, independent Internet providers like LARIAT throughout the United States.

Seeta Pena Gangadharan, whose op-ed titled “Can the FCC Fix the Internet?” appeared in Thursday’s Daily, rightly warns of the threat of a cable/telephone duopoly which offers consumers no choice. Unfortunately, many of these well meaning activists do not realize that the regulation that they are advocating — including mandatory carriage of bandwidth hogging, expensive and often illegal peer-to-peer (“P2P”) traffic — would actually put the remaining small competitors out of business, leaving consumers with the very duopoly that they so decry. They could also increase the price of broadband service dramatically or make it financially infeasible to deploy to rural areas. Advocates must therefore tread carefully, lest they propose “cures” that are worse than the disease.

Rather than micromanaging ISPs’ businesses, mandating that they not control their networks or throttle P2P, or dictating their business models or price structures, the FCC should do three things. Firstly, it should make strong rules prohibiting anticompetitive behavior. Secondly, it should ensure that all ISPs have access to the Internet backbone at a fair and reasonable cost — something which has become harder and harder due to mergers and acquisitions. And finally, the Commission should require full disclosure from all parties — not only ISPs but also content and service providers who try to commandeer users’ computers as their own servers. I’ve laid out a series of basic principles for “network neutrality” and sound regulation on my Web site. These principles start out by saying that users should absolutely have access to the legal content and services of their choice — but not in a way that abuses the network or allows third parties to abuse it. They also require full disclosure of not only what Internet providers are selling you but what is done to your computer by the software that you must install to enjoy content and services. Armed with these protections, users can enjoy both fast access to the Internet and — hopefully — an increasing choice of providers.

Brett Glass

M.S. 1985