NCTA today filed comments at the FCC in the “Broadband Industry Practices” proceeding in opposition to two petitions (from Free Press and Vuze) requesting that the Commission enact new regulation that would restrict the ability of broadband service providers to manage their networks to provide a better customer experience.

To quote from NCTA’s media release:

With the FCC’s 2005 adoption of a Policy Statement concerning broadband service, NCTA said that the Commission has already taken the correct approach – one of vigilant restraint – to ensure that the rapidly changing marketplace for broadband services develops in a way that best meets the needs of consumers. Importantly, the Commission’s 2005 Policy Statement expressly recognized that its broadband principles were “subject to reasonable network management,” NCTA said.

These seem to be the two key phrases: vigilant restraint and reasonable network management. In other words, broadband Internet services have evolved over time, responding to marketplace needs, and for the FCC to impose regulations would be, as the filing says, “likely to do more harm than good.” Further, network management “makes it possible to offer consumers access to the broadest possible array of services, sites and applications.”

The issue of network management has arisen with the growth of peer-to-peer services which are designed not only to download large files for long periods of time but also make their computers available as servers that constantly upload files for use by others. The use of peer-to-peer services by only a small fraction of Internet customers can consume a very large portion of the network’s resources and capacity which can interfere with the use and enjoyment of the Internet by other customers. So, without reasonable network management techniques, heavy usage of peer-to-peer services can degrade the overall speed of Internet access for all customers.

The filing enumerates some of the key points behind this approach:

• Not all applications use bandwidth in the same way.
• Content agnostic management of a network is not “censorship” or an anticompetitive technique to harm other services.
• Approaches to managing networks are best decided by network providers, rather than by the government.

This discussion reminds me of a point made in a Washington Post editorial almost two years ago:

If you want innovation on the Internet, you need better pipes: ones that are faster, less susceptible to hackers and spammers, or smarter in ways that nobody has yet thought of. The lack of incentives for pipe innovation is more pressing than the lack of incentives to create new Web services.

Today’s filing concludes by pointing out that there are a number of open questions about the best way to improve consumers’ experience of the Internet. Regulation would only put up a roadblock on the path to figuring out the right approaches.