Nice to see there are some influential figures within the world of the Internet who have a different view about net neutrality. George Gilder and Bret Swanson had an article in the Wall Street Journal this week about their views on net neutrality and they closely mirror my own.

Some key quotes:

We need a dramatic expansion in raw capacity, or bandwidth, and also fine-grained traffic management capabilities to ensure robust service for increasingly demanding consumers. But none of this can happen if we regulate complex network traffic engineering and experimental business plans.

…
Capacious, big-bandwidth networks will transcend many of today’s specific complaints. As raw capacity expands, more and more applications and users can peacefully coexist. But inevitably, sophisticated network users with innovative applications will find creative ways to push the boundaries of capacity on certain network links, and some bits will be shuffled and queued.

The network is now a global computer made up of hardware, software and human minds. But this new, fast-changing and highly organic computer is no more easily regulated than were the circuits, storage, memory and protocols of a mainframe or PC. Leaving it to Washington agencies and committees to engineer the exaflood would be an act of unimaginable folly.

This nicely mixes the practical reasons for avoiding total net neutrality (the present and ongoing need for traffic management to deal with bandwidth-intensive applications) and the philosophical idea that government and legislation is the wrong solution for almost anything having to do with the way the Internet runs. It’s simply too fast moving, as the 1996 Telecom Act has abundantly proven.