Verizon scorns net neutrality fight

Verizon Communications on Thursday dismissed concerns about net neutrality as "hypothetical problems" and suggested new laws mandating the concept were premature.

C Lincoln "Link" Hoewing, an assistant vice president at Verizon Communications, said the ability to charge for services such as high-quality video is crucial to being able to afford the multibillion-dollar price tag of upgrading its network-to-fibre links.

Hoewing told the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington: "We could put other services on those pipes - it's got a lot more capacity to do this," adding that it would help "to make it more viable economically and financially and to help us compete".

Calling concerns about net-favouritism entirely hypothetical, Hoewing said: "I'm getting tired of it... We've never done anything that I know to interfere with anyone's traffic."

Net neutrality, the concept that all internet sites should be treated equally by broadband providers without any kind of discrimination, has become a hot political topic in Washington, DC, this year. Lobbying for laws making the concept mandatory are companies including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! - which have found allies in Democrats and are being opposed by Republicans.

Republican members of the House of Representatives last week defeated a bid by Democrats to enshrine extensive net neutrality regulations into law. Under the defeated amendment, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would receive the authority to police the internet for violations of the rules and ban any kind of preferential treatment based on charging extra fees. (Even without the amendment, however, the FCC already has taken action in cases of blocking traffic.)

Hoewing said Verizon is able to slice up bandwidth on its high-speed Fios service based on different lasers and different frequencies. But he declined to say what services might be offered. "I can't give you a portfolio of services that I can lay out that are coming out of the broadband networks that we're deploying," he said.

Gigi Sohn, president of the Public Knowledge advocacy group which has pressed for neutrality legislation, said: "This is an issue of discrimination, or on the flip side, favouritism."

Sohn's group has been part of a coalition that includes one or two conservative organisations - but mostly liberal groups such as moveon.org. Perhaps as a result, Sohn acknowledged, "This has become very politicised on the Hill... They have decided to make this a partisan political issue."

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, admitted that some long-time internet hands may be sceptical of giving the FCC more regulatory power. But, he said, if AT&T would ink contracts letting google.com load in one second but other search engines load in three to four seconds, "that's a serious distortion of competition in that market".

Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com