Ars Technica is reporting today on a bit of interesting tech policy news out of the Comcast corporate blog.  The message? That they don’t “want net neutrality rules, and will still work to convince the FCC they are counterproductive,” but “we are obviously better off having ‘clear rules,’ as [Comcast CEO] Brian [Roberts] stated, than with the confusion of having the FCC try to enforce an unenforceable and vague ‘policy statement.’”

I have talked about Comcast’s and the other cable company’s vested interest in ensuring that the network neutrality rules go into place in a very specific way:

I’ve taken to using the following examples in my interviews and in my podcasts lately, because it’s true, bears out my experience, and perfectly illustrates the flaws in proposed network neutrality regulations. It’s relatively easy to start competing with the big boys, given a small capital expenditure (say about $10-30k to fund it for the first year or so), you could start up a local area broadband ISP that offers wireless or microwave services to a few metropolitan city blocks, perhaps servicing a few thousand customers or more.

In the past, I’ve seen companies that take this tactic (a couple of examples from South Florida spring to mind) and grow to be not-unformidable regional providers of broadband.

Now, imagine, because of governmental network neutrality mandates you’re now required to bolt on an $800,000 deep packet inspection piece of hardware so that the government can ensure you’re treating all packets equally.

Does that sound like it’s going to promote competition or inhibit it?

That’s exactly what sort of future we’re looking at – either the government is going to get serious about network neutrality and begin enforcing it with serious and very expensive iron fists, or they’re going to be ineffectual and simply require broadband carriers to disclose exactly what their network neutrality policy is.

Either way, we’re still left with a non-competitive landscape where we have a choice between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum to provide our connection to the rest of the world.

Comcast seems to have heeded my advice and taken a completely new approach to network neutrality – that is to say that they want “specific regulations” from the government as to what network neutrality will mean (as opposed to the loose and broad mandates they seem to be pursuing now), so that they and other very large broadband providers will be the only ones who will be able to provide network access.

An in so mandating a network neutral internet, the US government will also mandate that no small entrants to the market will ever emerge.