Comcast has a pretty good Op-Ed in the Philly Inquirer about the wild claims of the regulation-happy neuts:
“One cannot ignore the ominous signs that network operators will frustrate consumers’ ability to go anywhere on the Internet,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief technology officer.
Mundie made the “sky is falling” declaration in testimony before Congress in 2002. Four years later, the sky is still intact. In fact, Microsoft’s annual revenue grew, on average, by more than $10 billion per year; its net income grew by more than $3 billion per year. Meanwhile, the total value of Google’s stock has soared from nothing to about $117 billion. Everyone should have these kinds of “problems.”
Nevertheless, net-neutrality proponents are marching a new parade of horribles down Hypothetical Boulevard. But the two grievances they cite are really phantoms: One reported claim of content-blocking by a telephone company was promptly snuffed out by the Federal Communications Commission last year; the other one involved a software bug soon fixed by a third-party manufacturer. Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.
The cable-broadband business is in an intense rivalry with DSL, and we will face increasing competition from wireless and satellite broadband, fiber-to-the-home, and even broadband over power lines. Will the tens of millions of customers still on dial-up make the switch to us if we block access to content, prevent use of an application, or preclude the attachment of devices? We think not.
He refers to the alleged blocking of Craig’s List by Cox Cable, something that never actually happened. George Ou has an interesting update on that story, BTW:
Had Craigslist fixed their servers to behave according to best practice like everyone else on the web, the problem could have been universally fixed for all users with or without updated software from Authentium. Last month when the final update for Authentium was released, the story finally died down but the actual problem didn’t go away since it takes a long time for software updates to propagate to end users.
Yesterday when I was testing a new free network analyzer from WildPackets called OmniPeek Personal, I took a quick look at Craigslist.org and to my surprise it was fixed. I checked with a few of my colleagues and they verified the results. What surprised me was the fact that Craigslist never acknowledged any issues on their end yet they fixed it silently after all the smoke had cleared.
That’s right, not only was Craig’s List never blocked by Cox Cable, it had the power all along to overcome the problem it had with the personal firewall.
So who do you trust?
Gee, I love it when someone continues to carry an untrue example as a beacon for regulation.
Next I will use a vegetarian’s death as a reason only to eat meat. Even though the vegetarian was run over by a truck, I should still claim that we should all only eat meat.
I love it when someone who can’t spell tries to take literate people to task. And once I decoded what you were trying to say, it still didn’t make any sense! Get a dictionary nucrash.
Spelling and typos are a poor substitute for meaningful analysis.