“If people in power had realized what was going on with the Internet, they probably would have tried to stop it. The Internet as we know it is not a logical infrastructure development – it was a combination of genius and chance.
"What has evolved is that barriers of entry for self-publishing and self expression have declined. In the old days of the Internet you could just express yourself in text – now you can express yourself in audio and in video. It’s not only inexpensive, but practically free – anyone can do it.
"Now, what happens is that in all these areas the gate keepers have been going away… with any social change those gate keepers will try and rise up and reassert their power. The Internet has been extraordinarily resistant to that, and it would be very dangerous to let them reassert themselves.”
It was this idea of gate keeping that finally made all of the legal and business aspects make sense. This idea that certain people control our access to information – the way newspaper editors deciding what news is important, or a website writer deciding which facts are most necessary for their readers – can potentially extend to ISPs. If the ISP has control over bandwidth, they can make the decision to allow faster access to one site, while effectively restricting access to another. This could compel users to use one fast site by reducing the speed of a competing one, thus affecting users’ ability to access information from particular sites of their own choosing.
So if the stream from one Internet radio station keeps breaking up, you switch to another one. If that second choice happens to be from a service that belongs to the same corporation as your ISP… well, isn’t that just peachy?
Much of Scott Cleland’s defense centered on both the legality of competition in a free market and also that user choice would prevent companies from doing anything so stupid as to prevent their customers from accessing certain pages. There may be some legitimacy to ideas that companies that don’t provide the direct services, like Google, Microsoft, and others, should have to pay for their greater use of bandwidth. (Though advocates of these open market might hurt their cause through creepy websites like Don’t Regulate)
The problem, as Gigi Sohn articulated, was that if legislation changed so that companies could control the speed of information at their discretion, there would be less question of whether or not they should. And that potentially slippery slope could be avoided with a clarification of the legal protection of neutral networks.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
super job Claire, thanks so much!
2 - bliffle
Why struggle to enforce old monopolistic business models? Let them die, and then form new business models.
The whole concept of copyrights has been so abused that it no longer serves a useful purpose.