Why the application-layer perspective may not work
Two different people can see entirely different landscapes and end up solving problems differently.
So I'm working through how different perspectives on just why an open internet is important. My tentative conclusion: if you talk about competing applications prompting innovation, you'll lose. If the only economic and cultural justifications you have for the need for a layered approach to internet regulation (an approach that treats transport differently from applications) are (1) the explosive innovation that competition among applications would produce and (2) the appropriate mapping between the “actual” architecture of the internet and the regulatory approach to be taken to it, you'll lose.
Why? Because it's so easy for the carriers to use the layered approach against you. It's so easy for them to complain that it is unfair for rich companies like Google to be riding on their pipes without paying. They can transform the competition argument into one about fairness and equity. They can also point out that unchanging network architecture, if frozen into place, may discriminate against their applications in the future. And finally (and perhaps most importantly) they can say “okay, we won't discriminate based on the type of application that seeks to take advantage of our pipes.”
This last part is the heart of the problem — if network providers get to decide that they can charge all video packets, and that X new thingie is “really” a video packet in disguise, that gives them a tremendous amount of discretion. Who's to say what new thing falls into what category? And who's to say that blocking an entire category of stuff (say, P2P applications) is discrimination? “They're all being treated alike,” the carriers can say.
So playing around with the importance of competing applications isn't necessarily an effective perspective. Even the layers perspective as a whole may end up not being effective unless you can clearly separate out transport. It's so easy for the layers perspective to be flipped into an argument about the enormous benefits of vertical integration. “Innovation”-based arguments can so easily be transformed into “they want to free-ride” responses.
(By the way, watch out for people who want to say that “access” (the last mile) is separate from “transport” (the backbone), or that there's a “control plane” that is separate from “applications.” All of these distinctions are dangerous. That's another post, and another risk of an overly-religious adherence to a detailed layers-based argument.)
So we need another perspective. Here's my suggestion: Of course applications are important, but they're secondary to what they facilitate. What they facilitate, for more and more people, is human relationships. These groups/affiliations/whatever may be cross-application; they may be invisible; they may be hard to draw lines around. But they're what's actually interesting and complex/evolving about the net. Content-delivery isn't the game; humans are.
Once you use this new perspective, you gain a new appreciation for facilitating communications rather than the profits of infrastructure providers. And it turns out that facilitating these communications will lead to new ideas and economic growth. Rather than providing economic success just for the carriers, we'll be providing economic success for everyone.
Writing, writing — not much time left.