"U.S. lawmakers should avoid passing net neutrality laws as a way to help electronic-health initiatives move forward, an Internet provider trade group said Tuesday.
E-health and telemedicine applications will need to have priority routing over broadband networks in order to function properly, said David McClure, president and CEO of the U.S. Internet Industry Association (USIIA), which represents broadband providers and other Internet-based companies. Any legislation that would prohibit providers from prioritizing network traffic would be detrimental to e-health initiatives, he said.....
Consumer advocacy groups such as Public Knowledge and Free Press have pushed the U.S. Congress to pass net neutrality rules in recent years. Net neutrality rules would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors. Net neutrality advocates say large broadband providers shouldn't be able to give priority to an e-health application from a partner company and not give the same bandwidth to a competing e-health application.
Art Brodsky, spokesman for Public Knowledge, called USIIA's concerns 'nonsense.'
'What net neutrality strives to prohibit is favoritism,' Brodsky said in an e-mail. 'We don't want Kaiser (to pick one at random) to be the exclusive health-care provider of AT&T, so that customers of Aetna can't get the same monitoring services and the same emergency priority.'"
Comment: It should be possible to create regulations if desired that would privilege classes of use (e.g. health information, emergency reporting). I bet however that the industry will complain as soon as someone seeks to do to that it imposes too great a burden on the firms providing the pipes. JAD
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