“I will bring the whole edifice down on their unworthy heads.”
- Richard Burton in The Medusa Touch
Congress will consider the question of net neutrality Feb. 7 in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, as it attempts to update telecommunications laws, last updated in 1996. Telco critics are trying to maintain the equal access provisions.
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said during his Consumer Electronics Show keynote: “We have to make sure they [services] don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity.”
BellSouth CEO Duane Ackerman acknowledged the benefits of unique content but seemed to favor a mix of proprietary and non-proprietary offerings. “Unique content is going to be important, but taking this world…and making it easy for a mass market to do what they want to do when they want to do it is going to have a great deal of value.”
The phone companies’ networks that carry Net traffic around the U.S. are much like the highway system, explains Vint Cerf, who wrote that they may begin setting up the equivalent of tollbooths and express lanes, potentially discriminating against the traffic of other companies. Such moves, Cerf warned, “would do great damage to the Internet as we know it.”
“The short term enforcement of network neutrality, and the absence of similar enforcement mechanisms for other telephone and cable companies, means that Internet service providers and applications developers can be undermined by anticompetitive practices of network owners.”
Look. Different people have different points of view. But the case for muni networks just gets stronger.
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