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Net Neutrality 7-26-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

No, it’s “In the Beginning…”

. . . The Net, as Bob Frankston puts it, is the real infrastructure. It’s the superset, not the subset. It’s the ultimate context. TV, phone, radio, publishing, commerce and everything else will eventually come to you over the Net, if it doesn’t already.
The problem is, the Net is really nothing more than the shortest data path between two devices. You want fast and free Internet for the same reason you want a fast and free connection between your computer and your keyboard and your screen.
Think of the Net as a giant three dimensional zero. Everything across it is zero distance from everything else. The cost of using it isn’t zero, but once it’s built, that’s what it rounds to. (As I explained here a few days ago.)
How do we build that out, and who do we trust to do it, without screwing it up? There is plenty of business in building it out, as there is in all forms of construction. But maintenance shouldn’t look like the cable TV or phone businesses, any more than highway maintenance should look like a theme park.
More to the point, why trust building the “first mile” of the Net to people who never wanted it in the first place, who have always felt threatened by it, who can imagine their customers as nothing other than “consumers” of one-way “content”, and who want to create scarcities and insert billing valves everywhere they can? Because they’re the only ones in a position to do it? That’s not a good enough reason. It’s also not true. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 7-2-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

What If End-Users Owned Their Access Pipe?

PBS tech columnist Robert Cringely has penned an intriguing (and I think important) piece called “If we build it they will come: It’s time to own our own last mile.” It’s apparently based on conversations he’s had with Bob Frankston, who years ago wrote the VisiCalc program (which Cringely describes as “the first killer app”) and who last year authored an essay entitled “Connectivity is a Utility.” Cringely describes Frankston as “one of the smartest people I speak to.” . . .

If We Build It They Will Come. It’s time to own our own last mile. by Roger X.Cringley

To Bob [Frankston, the programmer who wrote VisiCalc] the issues surrounding Net Neutrality come down to billability and infrastructure. While saying they are doing us favors, ISPs are really offering us services they can bill for. Nothing is aimed at helping us, while everything is aimed at creating a billable event. Take WiFi hotspots, for example. Why should the telephone or cable company care about who connects to my WiFi access point? They are my bits, not the ISP’s. I paid for them. If I can download gigabytes of pornography why can’t I share my hotspot with someone walking down the street wanting to check his e-mail? Frankston’s analogy for this is accusing someone of stealing your porch light by using it to read a street sign.

It isn’t about service, it is about creating billable events, that’s all. And billable events, by definition, are things we have others do because we are unable or unwilling to do for ourselves. So a Verizon or a Comcast does us a favor, they say, by licensing rights to a movie and allowing us to buy or rent it over the Internet. We could buy the rights ourselves, but who would know where to even go? And wouldn’t Verizon, as a big buyer, necessarily get a better price? When you have a preferred or exclusive provider versus a competitive marketplace, prices are always higher, not lower. In this case the ISP isn’t doing us a favor, they are forcing us to buy from them something that we might well be able to buy from someone else for a lot less. . . .

The New Paranoid style in American politics By Andrew Orlowski

The “Net Neutrality” campaign – which created little excitement except on the outer fringes of the web – suggests that the left is now just as capable of being haunted by paranoid fantasies as the right.

What the internet has achieved, with its twisty maze of echo chambers all alike, is a rapid acceleration of this paranoid discourse, which expels nuanced and complex reasoning. Let’s have a look what was being written this week, after the Senate failed to pass those “Neutrality” provisions, as these hundreds of Nation States of One broadcast their distress signals.

“This could mean the death of small internet businesses,” wrote one MySpace blogger, quoted on CNET. A Republican opponent of the “Net Neutrality” legislation was graced, on the same site, with this riposte:

“Thanks, Jim, for being a fascist and promoting fascism in our country.”

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE