Internet Neutrality Again
A month ago I wrote about a Christian Science Monitor opinion piece on Internet neutrality, but Congress is still attempting to help its campaign donors.
There were people who commented on that post who felt that the government should butt out and let the “market” decide. Well, folks, the “market” and private enterprise had nothing to do with the creation of the Internet, and they have been profiting from the taxpayer-funded creation for quite some time.
Those who don’t understand the lack of participation by private enterprise should read: A Brief History of the Internet.
When you type in HTTP, HTML, and many other related acronyms you are using trademarks that belong to W3C, not a telco or cable company. Private enterprise didn’t create the TCP/IP Internet protocol, it was paid for by US taxpayers.
This has nothing to do with competition; you don’t get to choose the routing when you go to a web site, the ‘Net routes based on what’s available. These people have added to the “backbone”, but they don’t provide point-to-point access; everything they carry has to travel over other people’s lines, use other people’s routers, pass through other people’s equipment, use other people’s domain name servers.
If they want to start their own system, like The Source or Compuserve did in the “bad old days”, fine, but they don’t get to jack up prices on one section of the ‘Net, while getting a free ride for their customers on the rest of the ‘Net. Understand that the Internet only works because everything is treated equally. If things receive different treatment, the concept fails. Ask AOL users how their hybrid system is working?
No one forced them to carry Internet traffic, and they knew the rules when they joined. Congressmen who mess with the rules could find themselves looking for new jobs.
Move On has a petition and more information is available on Save The Internet. This is no different that the current oil prices. Have you noticed any competition form the oil companies? Have you compared the prices of your local cable company and telco for Internet services? These are corporations: they don’t believe in risk or competition.
2 comments
A quibble:
When you type in HTTP, HTML, and many other related acronyms you are using trademarks that belong to W3C, not a telco or cable company.
Most such web-related acronyms are “generic” terms, not trademarks per se; as best I can tell (IANAL), this means W3C registered them not to enforce their ownership of them (wouldn’t that be a laugh) but to prevent someone else from trademarking them.
(End of quibble.)
The balkanization of the internet (not to be confused with Balkinization, an excellent constitutional law blog, by Jack Balkin) would soon render it impossible to do business there, at least for enterprises that didn’t have the money to pay off the bigtime carriers. By contrast, the telephone system is highly balkanized, but ultimately, POTS either works or it doesn’t; AFAIK there’s no “first class” and “coach” for plain old telephone service. The internet is a different matter. Some of my clients over the last few years, especially near the beginning of commercial use of the web, would have been hammered if the biggies had been allowed to prefer their own content when acting as carriers. And that’s doubtless what they intend now: small startups with not a lot of capital to throw around simply won’t make a go of it. How lovely for AOL etc.
As with doctors who own the medical testing labs in the same building, I don’t rightly approve of allowing the same company to be both carrier and content provider. All the people who repeatedly bleat “free market!” should contemplate how little actual competition would result from such a change. “De facto monopoly” would be a better description of the result.
They are trademarked as part of the standards process. The trademark prevents commercial use and fixes the definition of the terms to the W3C standard, just as Sun did with Java.
To function properly, there have to be standards. This would be a violation of standards.
What is being proposed has nothing to do with free markets and competition. They want to distort the market and block competition.