We Need To Regulate Broadband And The Internet Separately

There are so many things wrong about the way we debate broadband policy, but one of the most erroneous is the conflation of regulating the Internet vs. broadband.

Now, I don't necessarily blame people for this confusion as the terms "Internet" and "broadband" themselves are not as well defined as they could be.

But here's a simple way to think about it: we need to regulate networks differently from traffic, just as we regulate roads differently from the cars that traverse them, or electrical networks from the appliances that use them.

We need one set of regulations for how physical networks are built and operated, and another for the things that happen on these networks.

While it may seem like an obvious proposition, too often broadband policy debates ignore or gloss over this distinction.

Arguably the most egregious example of this is the idea that net neutrality regulation and the push to reclassify broadband represent massive new pushes to regulate the Internet.

Ideally, if done correctly net neutrality rules and broadband reclassification won't have any direct regulatory contact with the Internet. That's because these issues deal with how broadband networks are operated, not with how the Internet is used.

Of course, I'm not naive enough to think that this issue is cut-and-dry. There are a number of areas where the lines blur between operating broadband networks and using the Internet.

For example, content delivery networks--which are what host and deliver most of the Internet's websites, content, and apps--often strike up deals with broadband operators to get preferential treatment to deliver their traffic.

Unfortunately, there's not necessarily any easy regulatory answer to the many complicated questions that attempting to regulate either broadband or the Internet pose.

But I do know this. If we continue to allow our broadband policy debates to blur the lines between regulating broadband and regulating the Internet then we're never going to really good broadband policy, or even productive broadband policy discussions.

To get us headed in the right direction, we need to start by recognizing that regulating the building and operation of broadband networks requires different solutions than regulating the delivery of sites, services, applications, and content on the Internet.