John Konop on net neutrality

I caught part of C-SPAN's Washington Journal segment on net neutrality this morning. One of the callers said that he was a Republican who was running for Congress and that he lived in Canton, Georgia. He didn't, however, try to get a plug in for his campaign as he didn't even identify himself by name. Still, I liked what he had to say and wondered if the caller was John Konop, a Republican candidate for Congress in Georgia's 6th Congressional District. I was able to confirm that it was him.

In his brief comments, Mr. Konop concisely articulated the argument in favor of net neutrality and against the tiered system. Essentially, it comes down to big corporations and their ability to monopolize the broadband internet networks. If the large telco companies can begin selling these tiers of high-level service, the "haves" (big biz) will be able to pay for and receive the fastest next-generational services at the expense of the "have not's" (small biz and average folks like you and me).

As an analogy, think about the lanes on one side of an interstate. What will happen if the five left-most lanes are reserved for big businesses and all small businesses and consumer traffic were relegated to one right-hand lane? Your speed and my speed (e.g., on blogs or on personal email or on internet searches) could easily trickle to a crawl. Networks are a zero-sum game. If one segment of users gets more bandwidth, the other segments get less bandwidth.

Also, small businesses who aren't willing or able to pay the bounty for the high-speed tiers would be essentially squeezed out of the marketplace. This is bad for all of us because it only creates high barriers to entry for companies who are trying to establish themselves. As a result, there will be less competition in the marketplace and the large businesses will be free to charge higher prices.

Unfortunately, a bill favoring big business has already passed the House. It's now being debated in the Senate. If you haven't already, please contact your Senators and urge them to vote against the tiered system and in favor of net neutrality.

On a side note, this wasn't the first time I had been in agreement with John Konop. I wrote about him last month. His position on net neutrality (which Tom Price did not vote for, BTW) is just one more reason I've decided to vote for him in this year's Republican primary.

If you want to hear the comments or see the segment on network neutrality, just go to the Washington Journal page on C-SPAN's website and watch the show from 6/26/06. Mr. Konop called in about 56 minutes into the show.