Verizon CEO: “We Will Find Pirates, Throttle Them, and Charge Extra”

CEO Ivan Seidenberg says it has to be able to deal with the 5% or 10% of customers that are “abusers…chewing up all the bandwidth,” and that “net neutrality” interferes with its ability to do so.

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg gave an interesting interview at the council for Foreign Relations a few days ago that proves the urgent need for Congress to enact “net neutrality” legislation, especially being that on the same day ISP Comcast won its appeal of an earlier FCC ruling that sanctioned it for throttling BitTorrent connections as part of its overall network management program.

“Anytime government — whether it’s the FCC or any agency — decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose,” he says. “So this FCC decided that speed of the network was the most important issue. So that’s all they measured.”

Oh really? The FCC doesn’t care about speed per se, but rather about maintaining an “open and accessible Internet” for all, thereby fulfilling President Obama’s campaign promise to also “protect the openness of the Internet.” As a candidate, then Senator Obama also said that throttling of BitTorrent and other P2P applications would be illegal.

All the FCC ever wanted is for Comcast to quit singling out BitTorrent in order to manage network traffic, not to maintain some arbitrary network speed.

Seidenberg also insists that the US has the best broadband system in the world, in part, because of its “greater household penetration,” and that its important the markets be allowed to decide what’s most important to customers.

“In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet,” he says. “So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.”

But, the problem with that is that customers aren’t always allowed to decide what they want, and as they say, “vote with their feet.” Oftentimes, ISPs have carved out territories that make it the only game in town, preventing the sort of choice that Seidenberg says should prevail over govt intervention.

Without govt intervention ISPs will be allowed to dictate selection, pricing, and accessibility.

With Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal last December we are seeing broadband providers merge with content providers, and the transition to digital media distribution. What happens when ISPs decide to throttle competing applications and services or block them altogether.

The real target of Verizon’s ire is the “5% or 10% of the people (who) are the abusers that are chewing up all the bandwidth.” He wants to see a policy where it gives customers a “chance to buy a bundle, a session of 10 megabits or a session of 30.”

He complains that “when we go after the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that — who knows what they’re doing,” that the govt, via net neutrality, negates the discretion it needs to run its business and “takes care of that 10% that’s abusing the system.”

It wants the ability to target excessive users and remedy the problem as it sees fit, saying that “those are the people we will throttle and we will find them and we will charge them something else.”

That again proves the need for net neutrality. If Verizon does decide to charge “excessive” users “something else” people most likely won’t have alternative ISPs to choose from unless they physically move.

Let’s hope Congress takes up net neutrality in the near future.

Stay tuned.

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[Hat Tip]