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

[Jim Philips]

On Sunday 11 June 2006 13:52, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> Geoffrey wrote:
> > It's like Joe's puts up an ad in the local paper
> > and Pizza Hut pays the newspaper to NOT print it.
>
> That already happens more than you may notice or care.  Billboards are a
> good example.  Do you really think that CocaCola needs a $1M billboard
> in Time Square?  No, but they will pay $1M every year to keep Pepsi from
> having that space.  Fox News did it to CNN at that CNN Center, signed a
> mulit-year lease on a billboard right outside CNN, then lambasted CNN on
> it.  Home Depot now buys up neighboring property when selecting a new
> site, specifically to keep Lowes from opening a store right next door.
> "Squeezing out Joe" has been a business tactic for as long as mankind
> has been doing business.

Yes, and this is a particularly inapt simile. Billboards have never been a 
medium the average Joe could use for communication. Telephones have always 
been that and the Internet became that. Telephones became that because of the 
principle of universal service (a classic case of government intervention for 
the benefit of majority over the benefit for the minority).  The principle of 
universal service stated that users easily reached would subsidize the costs 
of reaching users in more remote areas. Along with this came the idea that 
the phone company was a common carrier for all traffic and could not 
prioritize traffic on the common phone lines. These principles should be 
extended to the Internet. The value of a network rises with the number of 
people it reaches. I'll grant the phone companies that delivering an 18 meg 
video is a different task from delivering an all text e-mail like this one. 
But the phone companies have the balance in this equation all wrong. If the 
only way large files get delivered is through an agreement between the phone 
company and the large content providers, then the vitality of the Internet 
will dwindle dramatically. I would be more than happy to bear some of the 
costs of downloading, say, an iso of my Slackware distribution. If the telcos 
are the sole arbiters of what high bandwidth traffic can move, I probably 
won't even be able to get that Slackware distribution off the Net. So, I'm 
fine with somebody paying for higher bandwidth usage. What I'm bitterly 
opposed to is a situation where the content available is only decided by 
deals cut between the telcos and the content providers. If that happens, the 
Internet will start to look more like television. And while there are more 
choices on television than there used to be, it's still pitifully limited 
compared to the Internet.