NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow testified today at the Senate Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing “The Future of the Internet.” You can hear an MP3 of his delivered remarks and, earlier today, we featured a post that summarized his remarks.

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I particularly note his remarks at 2:22, when he said:

Every single person here has a blog or a website or has content that has distribution and has enabled consumers, millions of them around this country, to [access] that content and no one is blocking it… We want as much content, we want as many applications to succeed as possible. That’s what makes our broadband service attractive to consumers. And if we ever engaged in conduct that consumers were outraged about, they do have a choice. They can go somewhere else.

He said that while we can have a discussion on what is the most appropriate method of network management, “…there is zero evidence that any operator is engaging in anticompetitive conduct.”

However, despite the paucity of evidence of such behavior, Professor Lawrence Lessig, a big proponent of net neutrality, said that some might argue that we should wait until we see discrimination before we do something about it – which strikes me as a sensible approach to legislation – but that hi-tech investments are made today based on what investors think the network will look like in the future. He says there is such extraordinary uncertainty about what the future holds that it threatens innovation. Threats about what might happen without net neutrality have been around for five years, back to Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu‘s 2003 paper Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. I wouldn’t say that investors are shying away from promising broadband applications.

There was also a great deal of talk about what one person referred to as the United States’ “precipitous freefall” in terms of our global broadband ranking. I refer you back to our series on the problems with the OECD rankings, especially this post: The Truth About Japanese Broadband.

The cable industry has consistently demonstrated its commitment to policies that ensure all Americans have access to affordable broadband. This includes:

• Proposals to create a fund tailored to expanding broadband into unserved areas.
• The Broadband Data Improvement Act which would improve federal data collection regarding where broadband services have been deployed in the United States to achieve the goal of ubiquitous broadband availability for all Americans.
• Tax credits or other tax incentives to providers that build out in rural areas that are unserved by an existing broadband provider.
• Reform of the RUS broadband loan program so that funding is targeted specifically to unserved areas.
• Expansion of the FCC’s Lifeline and Link-Up Programs to help ensure that broadband access is extended to low-income households.
• Public-private partnerships to provide broadband in unserved areas.

We recognize that the government can play an important role in making certain that the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity are extended to all areas of this country. While broadband deployment to every community in America merits the full attention of policymakers, legislation calling for “network neutrality” or government intervention into the operation of networks would undermine the goals of broadband deployment and adoption.

The government’s consistent light regulatory touch since the introduction of broadband has worked. Only that continued regulatory freedom is likely to spur the investment and innovation that consumers have come to expect.

The cable industry is on the verge of making the leap — from “broadband” to “wideband” — with a technology which can enable dramatically higher download and upload speeds. Several weeks ago, for example, Comcast launched a “wideband” service in Minneapolis-St. Paul that offers speeds of 50 Megabits per second. Comcast expects to have wideband available to 20% of its systems by year-end 2008 and to all homes passed by mid 2010.

The efforts of broadband network providers to build larger and faster networks have helped ensure the success of countless numbers of new Internet businesses and applications. Despite concerns about alleged limited access to broadband, use of Internet video on demand has grown at the most dramatic rate. In February 2008, nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes viewing 10.1 billion online videos. YouTube represented 34% of those online videos, or nearly 3.5 billion.

For years, net neutrality proponents have argued that without government intervention, broadband providers would stifle competing services and content providers; Internet development and usage would stagnate; and consumers would be unable to use their broadband connections to download video or access other emerging applications. In fact, cable’s investment in broadband has driven innovation and investment in new content and applications at the edge — the exact opposite of what was predicted by advocates of net regulation.

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