Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

The New “Pipes� Are Already Paid For!

This doesn’t feel like an original source but it is informative – from Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews on May 12th. “Telcos Lay $200 Billion Goose Egg.â€?

Jason begins this discertation with this;

� The U.S. is ranked 12th in broadband penetration, says AT&T CEO Ed Whiteacre, and in order to bring America up to speed through fiber-to-the-premises (fttp) wiring, content providers are going to have to pony up to use his “pipes.� He doesn’t mention that the new pipes to be built have already been paid for, and they’re very late in coming.�

Already paid for? . . .

Well, here you go – Jason points to Bruce Kushnick’s book “$200 Billion Broadband Scandal. This book documents the largest fraud case in American history!â€?

“Starting in the early 1990’s, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the “National Infrastructure Initiative� to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies — SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.�

Wall St. Journal gets it [also via Wall Street Journal Straight Up]

From the mountaintop [the Wall Street Journal], straight talk on Internet regulation:

Don’t kid yourself that the issue here is “censoring� the Web. The issue is Internet survival. AT&T talks about the coming Multimedia Explosion as new forms of video traffic rapidly overtake Web-surfing, file transfer and email as the prime users of backbone capacity. Literally, “net neutrality� would result in an increasingly unreliable Internet as more and more high-bandwidth applications contest for space on networks that nobody would have an incentive to expand.

The real issue is where will the big bucks come from to create an Internet capable of handling the services now envisioned, let alone those not yet dreamed up. BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry Kafka told an audience in March that a typical broadband user today consumes about two gigabytes of data a month, at a network cost of $1. Once TV has gone high-definition and on-demand, a typical user will consume about 1,120 gigabytes a month at a cost of $560 (that’s in addition to the administrative, sales and service costs that today make up the lion’s share of the user’s bill). “Clearly that’s not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service,� Mr. Kafka said. “That’s why we need help.�

Net Neutrality, and the hope the US could learn some lessons from African experience

As I think back on it, the vast majority of the policy work I did in Africa was, on one level or another, net neutrality work. As Voice over IP became increasingly important in African nations, I was concerned that phone companies would claim authority over any electronic voice traffic, forcing one of the most interesting developments in telephony into illegality to protect their lucrative monopolies… which is precisely what happened in most countries. Some countries are now discovering they have to undo these decisions and make VOIP possible now, because it’s such a powerful technology and economic force, letting people communicate with families overseas because technical innovation and invention has lowered the price of voice transmission.

It would be a shame to see the US make the same mistake many developing nations made almost a decade ago.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE