The Freedom to Connect conference is in DC today and tomorrow and the topic du jour is Net Neutrality.
Eric Schonfeld at Business 2.0 notes that former FCC Chairman and current speaker-about-town issued a strong warning to the pro-NN crowd about the unintended dangers of legislating a tech mandate:
The legislative process does not work well when it has a weak understanding of innovation and tech policy. You are talking about 535 members who need to to get this. They have a very shallow understanding [of Net Neutrality]. If you go give them a quiz about the seven layers of the Internet, good luck.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword. It is much harder get a law off the books than to get it on. Someone will think it is a good idea to apply the same rules to the other side's products and services. Be careful because you are playing their game [the telcos']. We are talking about resources, ability, and 100 years of skill.
Dana Blankenhorn got cold water thrown on his pro-NN face by hearing from the DC crowd that legislation might go nowhere this year:
...the Washington experts who spoke to the conference showed no interest in it. The inclination seemed to be, wait until the principle is egregiously violated, then jump in. And the audience, which should have been wildly enthusiastic, seemed more interested in getting new unlicensed spectrum as a route to competition than mandating it through a law.
Others were more positive about a Wyden bill. Yet, It-Blogger Om Malik pipes in from the West Coast that "getting politics involved in NN is going to create one messy situation."
Regardless of what you think about Net Neutrality, it's good to see the F2C event getting together the two incredibly insular communities of Washingon policymakers and hard core technologists and forcing interaction, and, presumably learning.
UPDATE: More Net Neutrality links from today's Good Morning Silicon Valley.
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