The Internet revolution relies on a foundation of an enabling infrastructure allowing a radically decentralized group of developers to create their own applications. Over time, even the meager technical barriers to participation and importantly development have decreased to the point of being merely a nuisance.

This freedom has led to the creation of unanticipated new applications, unforeseen billion dollar markets, and new devices for personal communication that never showed up on a technology road map. However, at the same time many uses have created obstacles (impact of file sharing on copyrighted materials, anonymous posting online, slanderous speech in Web pages, etc). When a civil society is confronted by problems it traditionally turns to the legal system to create new regulations or laws to alter behavior. To date, this has not been the case for the Internet which has instead attempted to address problems through innovation as opposed to regulation.

The issue currently focusing the debate on regulation vs innovation has to do with the consideration of punishment (legal sanction) against Comcast for limiting the bandwidth available to a peer to peer network application called BitTorrent. Comcast has argued that this was necessary to manage their network while others have argued that their behavior was motivated by competitive reasons. As the issue was brought to the regulatory light of the FCC the two companies reached a private compromise. The compromise means that Comcast will not target the BitTorrent application as they have done in the past and that BitTorrent will work with ISPs, and the Internet Engineering Task Force, to develop ways to optimize file swapping on their networks. [1]

On the face of it this should be the end of the story, the Internet was again able to come up with a compromise solution that will spur new technology development improving the global commons through engineering. Unfortunately although both companies have indicated to the FCC that no regulatory action is required once motivated government becomes difficult to stop. The FCC decision on this issue
later this week will set not only important precedent regarding P2P file sharing but also impacts the "tradition" of conflict resolution on the Internet.

Robert McDowell, current FCC Commissioner, perhaps explains it best in his recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post:

"If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions. Another concern is that as an institution, the FCC is incapable of deciding any issue in the nanoseconds that make up Internet time. And asking government to make these
decisions could mean that every few years the ground rules would change based on election results. The Internet might grind to a halt in such a climate. It would certainly die of clogged arteries if network owners had to seek government permission before serving their customers by managing surges of information flow."