After two days of impassioned speeches about network neutrality, I am beginning to think that we've been drawn onto the wrong battlefield. 

The network owners can always talk about the benefits of vertical integration and the impossibility of calling network providers "essential facilities" ("we're not essential, because competition is always possible!").  They can say that although there's a duopoly in each local market (at best -- sometimes there's only one choice of broadband provider), there's no concentration in the national market.  They can say they have every incentive to promote innovation and interconnect.  They can point to other regulatory structures mandating interconnection and nondiscrimination that appear to have impeded competition rather than encouraged it.

To talk in response about the glories of the end-to-end principle and the importance of facilitating end-user choice sounds weak.  All we're saying is that we like the norms of our network better then the norms of their network.  They have invested $1.1 billion over the last few years in lobbying designed to support their network. 

I don't think the fight over "network neutrality" is one we're going to win. 

We need to find higher ground.  I think the real fight should be over rights of way and platform competition.  There's a clear lack of competition in the last mile -- that's where choice has to exist, and it doesn't now.  Even the FCC's own figures reveal that cable modem and DSL providers are responsible for 98% of broadband access in the U.S., and two doesn't make a pool.  If the FCC is getting in the way of cross-platform competition, we need to fix that.  In a sense, we need to look down -- at the relationship between the provider and the customer -- rather than up at the relationship between the provider and the bits it agrees to carry or block.  

Let the dinosaurs block applications.  Listen to SBC CEO Edward Whitacre:

Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?

A: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo!or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

That's the voice of someone who doesn't think he has any competitors.  Competition in the market for pipes has to be the issue to focus on, not the neutrality of those pipes once they have been installed.  We'll always lose when our argument sounds like asking a regulator to shape the business model of particular companies.

Let's not assume that competition is impossible.  There has to be a move towards higher ground that we can collectively make.