As we navigate the highway that is the mobile Internet, sharing the road is more important than ever.

As we embark on the New Year, the wireless industry is under a very public microscope for a bevy of issues. One of them is net neutrality, and given how the FCC voted when it drafted the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking back in October – with only two of the five commissioners dissenting in part on concerns about the need for creating such rules – you can figure where the majority of votes is headed.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has said he favors “fair rules” for an open Internet that recognize the difference between wireless and wireline networks. He’s also referred to such regulations as “rules of the road” that we need to survive in the age of the Information Superhighway.

In that case, let’s consider how the rules literally work on roads. You can’t drive just anywhere. You can get pulled over if caught driving the wrong way on a one-way street or violating the posted speed limit. You can get arrested for recklessness or violating any number of laws, which, by the way, have evolved over the years and continue to change.

CAR AND DRIVER
If wireless carriers are required to play by the rules, shouldn’t their users be as well? If someone watches on average 20 YouTube videos a day or listens to hours of music, shouldn’t they pay more than someone who occasionally browses the Web? Such pricing angers some consumers. Anyone who witnessed the support drummed up in “Operation Chokehold” by the Fake Steve Jobs, whose “joke” turned into a mission to pressure AT&T into making network improvements, can see how angry people can get.

There’s a lot of speculation about tiered or usage-based pricing for data. Not so many years ago, consumers found out that many of the industry’s “unlimited” data plans were not unlimited at all. Bandwidth hogs got their hands slapped with heftier bills or threatened with service cancellations. More recent publicity about the 3 percent of iPhone users who account for 40 percent of the traffic on AT&T’s data network and AT&T’s $30 pricing plan have renewed speculation about ways carriers should manage their data users.

Tiered pricing sounds not only reasonable, but reflective of how voice services have been priced. Some operators will need to stop with the “unlimited” offers and carefully migrate users – with full disclosure – to plans based on usage, sort of like toll roads. The terms need to be clear and understandable about what the service package supports. For example, if you’re paying $30 a month, you get X amount of video downloads a day, and for $35 a month, you get XYZ amount of video a day. Or a month – pick a timeframe. But use simple language and stick to it. Talking bytes and megabytes is just confusing.

NEED FOR INVENTORY
To meet capacity demands, carriers need spectrum. The FCC should not proceed any further – beyond the comment cycle – on its net neutrality rules until the government conducts a thorough inventory of who’s using what spectrum and where spectrum is available for the wireless industry. That’s what would happen under the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, which CTIA is asking policymakers to pass.

This is only common sense. A couple months ago, the General Accounting Office (GAO) finished a report titled “FCC Needs to Improve Oversight of Wireless Phone Service.” The GAO spelled out how it surveyed 1,143 adult wireless phone users and found that about 84 percent were very or somewhat satisfied with their wireless phone service.

If the government found the wherewithal to conduct that report, which could have been accomplished with a phone call or two to the FCC to find out what they had been doing the past several months, then surely the government can find the resources to conduct a spectrum inventory. It’s a tedious job, but it’s the kind of thing the FCC should have been doing all along. In fact, it seems to me that some years ago, the FCC had a better clue on who was using what, but I honestly don’t know what happened during the intervening years, how accurate those charts were back then or what kind of priority or non-priority was given to doing inventories.

The debate over net neutrality is going to be with us for some months. Once rules are established, they’re going to need updating every so often. The FCC doesn’t have the greatest track record in getting around to those updates. But it would behoove everyone pushing for these rules to remember that times change at record speed in wireless, and we must avoid multi-car pileups that leave innovation in the back seat and crash victims in their wake.