[ale] OT: Craig Newmark of Craig's List on Net Neutrality

[Pete Hardie]

> Consider this:  Suppose Speakeasy wants to over VoIP to their customers.
>     Speakeasy pays a significant upfront cost for offering DSL/Broadband
> at $$/month, so it takes years before a subscription really pays it's
> fair share (given the costs and expectations of
> datacenters/uptime/services these days).  So, I think it is perfectly
> legit for Speakeasy to not want Earthlink or Comcast to be able to offer
> an equal, but free or discounted, VoIP service to Speakeasy customers
> with the intention of luring those customers into long term contracts
> including moving them away from Speakeasy.
>
> I think Net Neutrality had it's day when the NSF ruled the Internet, and
> those days are long gone.  It's a dog-eat-dog world now (look no further
> then the underlying issues with spam, hosting, and peering) and big dogs
> protect their turf.  I personally think Net Neutrality would cause
> investors to invest less in the new "shared" infrastructure thus
> producing many more problems down the road.
>
> Imagine if Congress declared the sidewalk in front of your home could
> be used for my next picnic.... and worse, you could be excluded from
> partaking in the festivities. ;-)

Personally, I think it's closer to the company that built my
subdivision's roads requiring me
to rent a vehicle from them to drive on those roads.

Enforcing Net Neutrality might slow down the deployment of higher
speed connectivity.  But allowing the *monopoly wire providers* to
block out any traffic that either does not pay them for favored
access, or competes with a service that the monopoly wants to provide,
means that we will not get good versions of that service - witness the
quality of lon-distance service once Ma Bell was forced to allow
competition.   Sure, there were many fly-by-night shoddy LD services,
but the market weeded them out, and we now have good, cheap LD.

As long as Bellsouth want to offer any bone of a service, they will be
able to block better services - look at DSL, now that they are not
required to allow equal access to Speakeasy/SpeedFactory/etc.

-- 
Better Living Through Bitmaps