But the bill has several important provisions that you may not be as familiar with. Below the fold, I've listed a few that stood out to me:

The bill covers all the more well-known problems. For instance, it prevents Internet providers from blocking sites, and from entering into agreements to deliver certain sites at higher speeds. That's all to the good.

I just finished reading the net neutrality bill that Markey and Eshoo introduced last week -- the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458) ( pdf ). And it's really good stuff. The leadership should move on it.

Ensuring Sufficient Bandwidth

One challenge in promoting open networks is the Whack-A-Mole problem. You can prevent one bad network practice, but then a new one emerges to take its place.

Bandwidth caps fall into this category. Even if Congress requires carriers to treat traffic "neutrally," they can accomplish the same goals by limiting your bandwidth, or by limiting the amount of data you can download in, say, a month.

Comcast, for instance, wants you to rent movies from them -- not from iTunes, not from BitTorrent. If they can't block these sites, they can still limit your ability to download from them by instituting bandwidth caps. After a few downloads of HD movies, you'd be over the limit.

This practice would be "neutral," but still discriminatory. Caps aren't a big problem now, but they will be in the very near future with the continued growth of HD and other high-data video services.

The bill, however, explicitly requires providers to "make available sufficient capacity . . . [for] services that require high bandwidth communications." Basically, it gives the FCC authority to see what's really going on if things like caps are instituted.

Plus, it makes increased capacity a national policy goal. Virtually every complaint that Internet providers raise goes away with more capacity. That's why we need to create incentives to expand, as opposed to creating incentives to maintain scarcity. Neutrality requirements do that.

Network Management

Under any neutrality scheme, carriers need to be able to protect their networks. The fear, though, is that they'll do bad things like block BitTorrent under the guise of "network management."

The bill strikes a good balance here. It allows for reasonable network management, but also puts a strong burden on carriers to justify their practices. Specifically, the bill echoes the language of strict scrutiny -- carriers can do network management, but it has to be "narrowly tailored" to a "critically important interest."

Public Disclosure

The bill also requires providers to publicly disclose information about their service -- things like speed, limitations, etc. The beauty of public disclosure is that it allows the FCC to "crowdsource" network monitoring. By publicly disclosing this information, the Army of Davids can more easily detect monkey business. And that's a huge deterrent.



Stand-Alone Internet Service

The bill requires providers to sell "stand-alone" Internet access. Let's say you only wanted Internet access from Comcast. The bill would prevent Comcast from requiring you to buy video service, or other "bundles" of services.

Expedited Complaint Procedures

The bill requires the FCC to rule on neutrality complaints within 90 days, and thus prevents Internet providers from dragging proceedings out.

Delay tends to hurt smaller companies and startups because the risk and uncertainty limits their ability to get capital. This is arguably what happened in Verizon's patent litigation against Vonage -- even if Verizon didn't win (which they did), they could spook investors by dragging Vonage into a long and expensive discovery process.

Wireless Net Neutrality

I'm not 100% sure, but I read the bill as establishing open device requirements that would apply to wireless devices too (so long you can access the Internet from them). Under this regime, customers could buy devices like the iPhone and use them on any network they pleased. Don't quote me on that yet -- I'm still trying to confirm. But that's how I read p.7 [(b)(3)], combined with the definition of "Internet Access Service Provider" on p.13.

Either way, it's a really good bill.