I’m like most people who have complained in the past about my wireless provider, although I’ve been very happy with Verizon over the last few years. But my happiness and yours may diminish, as the Federal government might force wireless carriers to treat all web traffic the same, which means carriers couldn’t block or slow access to sites that are a drain on their networks or offered by rivals. To me this is a power grab by the FCC, unless their is some part of this potential regulation that I’m not grasping.

To quote the WSJ article:

If the FCC does force U.S. wireless carriers to open their networks to data-heavy applications like streaming video, it could push them beyond the limited capacity they have. Already, in areas like New York and San Francisco, a high concentration of iPhones has caused many AT&T customers to complain about degrading service.

Its a wonderful thing to have additional content on a wireless carriers network. I would suggest that this is one part of the service offering from a carrier that a consumer looks at when deciding on which carrier to use (although phone model offerings, and plans are likely more important). Although I’m no expert in the wireless industry, I just don’t see the market failure here. Why is it necessary for the government to step in and force an industry to do something that it doesn’t want to do, that it hasn’t done, and for which there are competitive pressures for them to be doing?

On the competitive pressure point. I imagine that one carrier would like to provide access to more websites and online content than their rivals. It provides more value to their customers making them more happy. I am fairly sure that they would want to properly balance this with network reliability and consistent access. I trust that they are doing a good job at balancing these issues or else someone else would do a better job and the company doing a bad job would go out of business (or at least loss market share). That’s competitive pressure, their is pressure within the industry to do this correctly. And I don’t see much evidence of the contrary.

One cited reasons for these new rules is that wireless providers are now in the content generation market, and they favor their own content and sites by slowing or speeding up certain sites. If their content is not good content and they favor their sites too much compared to their competition then customers would switch service providers, or at least bitch to their current service provider.

My point is basically, if consumers found this to be a problem such that they were not being served properly, then some company would realize this and offer a service which fulfilled that consumers needs. Or at the minimum you would here complaints from consumers rather than other businesses.

The Obama administration is taking the side of Google, Amazon.com Inc. and an array of smaller businesses that want to profit from offering consumers streaming video, graphics-rich games, movie and music downloads and other services.

WSJ article