This week's court decision pushed the Net neutrality debate to new heights, but listen closely, and you'll mostly hear hot air A tech columnist, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, and the Grand Wizard of Net Persecution for Verizon walk into a bar. The tech journalist slides into a booth, orders whiskey and wings, and sits back to watch the show. The EFF lawyer takes off his organic burlap sweater, while the Grand Wizard puts down the fluffy white cat he normally strokes in his office as he monitors the world and sends large men with metal teeth after British spies. Then they proceed to repeatedly bump chests threatening to beat each other bloody. It’s awesome for the first five minutes, but gets boring fast when you realize no actual fists will be thrown. These guys hate each other anyway, but it’s more pronounced today because some old guys in tailored suits made in Hong Kong of cloth spun from child sweat and tears decided to strike down the Net neutrality laws the FCC apparently shouldn’t have been allowed to enforce and have supposedly been keeping all of us using a fair and equal Internet. Two ends of a long feud trying to kick each other in the gonads with nasty nouns — pass the scotch and popcorn, please. Get ready to rumble The EFF lawyer believes that, without Net neutrality, criminally insane sociopaths at companies like Verizon will co-opt the Internet that they essentially own from a pipe level in certain regions and prioritize network traffic for their own nefarious ends, like throttling the life out of Netflix movie streaming packets in favor of their own FiOS entertainment service. He’s screaming this at the Verizon exec while taking off his peace-sign necklace in preparation for a savage beat-down. Are these the paranoid ravings of a left-wing pinko commie activist who hates American capitalism and uses our flag to wipe his nether regions? Verizon’s Grand Wizard thinks so. He’s bellowing that he doesn’t want any trouble, though I see him palming his stainless steel tiepin and lining it up with the pinko’s jugular. On-topic he responds he’s outraged at the accusation against his entirely ethical and well-meaning organization — yet he’s wearing the salaciously satisfied look that Chris Christie has after a visit to a jam-packed tri-state bridge. He cites that there’s only been one case in all of legal lore where a carrier tried something along those lines, and the miscreants were soon caught, prosecuted, and flogged as they deserved. Shadowboxing Chest bump, spittle flying, whiskey shot — sure, there hasn’t been much in the way of selective packet throttling, says the EFF legal eagle, because it’s been illegal. But all carriers have used QoS and packet prioritization over the last decade, often aggressively so, and this ruling opens the floodgates to stifling innovation and committing evil sins against the consumer and God-fearing Americans everywhere. Free Web access will grind to a halt, free speech will cease, and tech innovation will be crushed like a cute, fuzzy bunny beneath a falling log. Of course we’ve been implementing QoS, the Verizon exec bawls. Without QoS, people like deviant BitTorrent users and eye-patch-wearing superspammers would hog so much bandwidth that the Internet would be rendered useless to the rest of us. Removing FCC restrictions means these bastards will not only have their packets de-prioritized, they’ll be completely blocked, caught, and sent to Gitmo for enthusiastic waterboarding by highly paid and talented sadists — no more than they deserve. There’s no reason for carriers to persecute rival Web-based services since they’ve never done it before. Restricting them with legislation makes about as much sense as the LAPD raiding Justin Bieber’s house looking for eggs. I’d have been enjoying a little nap by this point if the two of them hadn’t been so damn loud. Arguments predicated on extremes press my boredom button almost immediately. Neither joker is right, or maybe each is half right. Net neutrality giveth and taketh away Net neutrality has been keeping the Web free to a degree and certainly hasn’t hurt tech innovation, but it’s also weakened infrastructure investment, as evidenced by the fact that the United States is in something like 25th [Editor: More like 33rd.] place when it comes to average bandwidth to the home, right behind Antarctica. On the other hand, packet prioritization is an essential evil to keep the Internet running at all, and it’s required technology for the content distribution networks that keep Netflix and YouTube in business and ensure that today’s teenagers can addle their own hormones at home via uninterrupted streams. Will carriers throttle Web services that compete with their own offerings? Of course they are, but not enough to seriously piss off everyone. After all, it’s legal now. If Netflix or Google files suit, the case will be in court for about a decade, during which time the carrier set will enjoy a little business boost (though “little” is relative depending on how many billions you have). For them, it’s good commerce to see how far they can push the boundaries before we stage a million-man march on Verizon HQ. But it’ll also bring healthier Internet performance and perhaps more serious dollars devoted to laying fiber to the home. Yeah, middle-of-the-road thinking is a shade dull, but it’s still the way of the world — so sit down, shut up, and see what happens, you two. Technology Industry