Recently, the Rural Utilities Service, one of those alphabetical federal government agencies better known as RUS, issued some proposed new rules to straighten out the operations of their broadband lending program. Congress began this program in 2002 with the admirable goal of bringing broadband to rural areas, which generally have a lesser availability of broadband services because of the expense of building broadband facilities in areas with as few as 3 or 4 people per mile.

But the program didn’t work very well in its first five years — a lot of loans went to areas to provide broadband in places that already had it, and RUS made it harder than necessary to get loan money for areas that didn’t have broadband. After getting a lot of criticism from government watchdogs as well as from Congress, RUS decided to try to remedy the problems with the broadband loan program — through these draft rules which were sent out for public comment.

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Billions of dollars are being spent to make our highways “intelligent €?. Power companies seek to preserve energy by making the distribution and use of electric power more intelligent. Heck, even bowling alleys are more intelligent than they used to be — they keep score and show you how to knock down the pins remaining.

But proponents of net regulation seem intent on keeping the broadband network “dumb €?. In his statement accompanying release of the FCC’s Notice of Inquiry on Broadband Industry Practices, Commissioner Michael J. Copps says: “The original idea was to have neutral dumb networks with intelligence invested at the edges, with you and me and millions of other users. €?

Commissioner Copps seems to be evidencing nostalgia for a dumb broadband network. I find this strange when even net regulation proponents are now acknowledging the need for traffic prioritization which requires network intelligence. (more…)