Former FCC chairman Reed Hundt has responded to Kevin Drum's request that he weigh in on net neutrality. The results are not good. I think. I haven't got time to pore over the thing at the moment, and it's slightly hard to decipher what he's going on about. The man actually uses the word "twas" — perhaps the only blogospheric construction more irritatingly precious than "whilst".

His initial discussion might spiral into complaints about the digital divide and a veiled call for approaching net access as a regulated public utility. I can't really tell. To the extent that he's endorsing that particular pipe dream, consider me on board.

But his primary point seems to be a parrotting of the new line the telcos are taking, now that it's becoming clear that folks aren't falling for the pathetic lies of the Mike McCurrybots that have been deployed. The argument goes something like this: "Waaaaahh! Video-Over-IP is coming! It's going to require new infrastructure to handle its immense traffic! Otherwise internet video won't work, and existing networks will become hopelessly clogged! Grant us an effective monopoly on IP services (via the ability to set the price of competitors' services) so that we can pay for these changes!"

This is a load of crap. First, ISPs are already maintaining service in the face of a high-bandwidth app, and doing so just fine. It's called BitTorrent — maybe you've heard of it? If you have, and you use it, you may be interested to know that your downloads probably don't run as quickly as they theoretically could. Many big ISPs are now throttling BitTorrent traffic in order to ensure other clients' quality of service is uninterrupted (and to save themselves money). This is as it should be. If bandwidth is really in short supply, it could be done for video as well. And there are other things that can be done, too — for instance, caching servers at the ISP level to save bandwidth as a subnet downloads a particularly viral YouTube clip a hundred times in an hour. These things cost money, but it's pocket change compared to building a new infrastructure. And you are currently paying them to do something, right?

So what about the other half of the question — the fantastic new services we'll miss out on if we don't agree to give Comcast a leg up against every .com that doesn't own a cable network? Count me as a skeptic. If there's demand for those services, the networks to support them will get built. I didn't take a lot of econ courses, but this seems pretty obvious.

To the extent that there'll be a holdup translating demand into supply, it'll be the ISPs' own damn fault. Right now their billing policies make no sense. They sell you an all-you-can-eat connection at a set speed, but become very upset if you actually use the bandwidth you've theoretically purchased, like an buffet manager tersely asking a fat guy to leave. Comcast, for example, doesn't publish download limits, but every month it sends out letters to its heaviest users threatening to suspend service if they don't ratchet back their use of the network. They refuse to say what the limit is — all signs indicate that they just print out a set of letters and mail them out to their top downloaders, regardless of how much was actually downloaded. It's a really, really stupid and dishonest way to do things.

If heavy bandwidth use doesn't provide additional revenue that's needed to build the systems to support it, the answer is to make it do so — but NOT by granting a permanent anticompetitive advantage. Instead, meter bandwidth like the water company does. Charge a flat monthly fee for connectivity and account maintenance, plus a reasonable per-gigabyte usage fee. This would end up hurting geeks like myself whose data-sipping neighbors subsidize part of our digital gorging, but it's really the only way to approach the problem that makes sense — and it's how big companies pay for bandwidth.

Do it this way and the market ought to sort everything out. There's no reason to grant Comcast-On-Demand a relative monopoly versus a theoretical TivoIP service. Someone who uses on-demand video from a third party will consume a lot more bandwidth — Comcast can still expect to get paid for the work they do to support these wonderful new services.

What they can't expect is support for their empire-building aspirations. I realize the telecom execs are really excited by their monopolistic dreams, but the rest of us just want them to do their fucking jobs quietly and well. I signed up with Verizon because I needed internet access, not because I wanted to purchase all of my information services from them for the next few decades.