Here are two items from the neut front. First an article in Salon by Big Neut Tim Wu in which he makes a little sense: None of this is to say that a good network-neutrality rule must be absolute, or even close to absolute. It’s an open secret that AT&T and Verizon want to become … Continue reading “The Daily Neut”
Here are two items from the neut front. First an article in Salon by Big Neut Tim Wu in which he makes a little sense:
None of this is to say that a good network-neutrality rule must be absolute, or even close to absolute. It’s an open secret that AT&T and Verizon want to become more like cable television companies. If Verizon wants to build a private network to sell TV, that would justify broad powers to control the network, a precondition to providing the service at all. No neutrality rule should be a bar to building better networks that do more.
OK, so why are you trying to do just that, prevent American companies from building better networks?
And the other is a piece by Mumon, a very prominent figure in the world of wireless networks:
The real issue for “net neutrality” is that an advanced internet needs to be built, financed, and initiated through the government help, like it is in Korea, Japan, and China. That’s why our access charges are so steep relative to these places. Put big pipes everwhere, and the high class QoS services can easily coexist with the best effort folks. That’s an issue of capital infrastructure deployment and build-out, which in the US, with its lack of centralized planning for such things, doesn’t exist. Hopefully rapid deployment of true competitive access schemes (Broadband Power Line, WiMax) might alleviate this problem. But that takes a new policy, committment, and intervention, with a quid-pro-quo of warranties of operability.
Mumon cites the WaPo’s editorial today, and essentially agrees with it:
Yet perhaps without realizing it, those who are now advocating “net neutrality”– the notion that those who shell out the big bucks to build new much higher speed networks can’t ask the websites that will use the networks intensively to help pay for them– could keep this new world from becoming a reality. Further, they could deprive the websites themselves of the benefits of being able to use the networks to deliver their data-heavy content.
That’s all I have time for today.