Over the last six months, the Net Neutrality debate has gone from one bill to several competing pieces of legislation House and Senate committees continue to examine this week. The Wall Street Journal
sets up an interesting back-and-forth between Craig Newmark, founder of the massively popular classifieds site craigslist.org, and a supporter of net neutrality, and Michael McCurry, a communications
strategist for nearly three decades in Washington who supports the big telecoms. If nothing else, the debate showcases how incredibly complex this issue is. Here are some sound bytes: "We have no
clear evidence that content is being discriminated against and we have no real problem with quality of service that cannot be addressed under current law," says McCurry, adding that neutrality
advocates haven't pointed to a problem that isn't addressed in existing legislation. Newmark makes a similar point for the other side: he contends that the telecoms falsely complain about a lack of
bandwidth when their engineers have told him they actually have a lot of empty fiber. The bigger problem, he says, is the lack of existing Internet protocols, which the telecoms haven't upgraded to
the next level "due to bureaucratic inertia."
Read the whole story at WSJ.com (paid subscription required) »
