January 16th, 2006
Net Neutrality Wars Breaks Out
By Mark Evans
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
So, the net neutrality war has finally begun in earnest after BellSouth confirmed it is moving to charge Internet content and service companies for traveling over “its” network. “It’s the shipping business of the digital age,” said BellSouth CFO William Smith in trying to justify the new, misguided tactics to ensure, for example, the complete and rapid transmission of an iTunes song. As much as Fred Wilson might describe these new fees as “jealously”, the sad reality is the carriers are trying to make it happen as they desperately scramble to deal with the decline of their local phone businesses. To support TechDirt’s succinct take on this evil campaign, the carriers trying to cut off their noses to spite their faces. Truth be told, their networks have little value unless there’s content from Yahoo, Google, eBay, Vonage, Joe’s Fishing Shop, et al to convince consumers to pay for them. I mean, do we really need high-speed Internet to check e-mail? Unfortunately, the carriers don’t see it this way because they’re blinded by an economic revolution that has caught them by surprise. Who would have thought five years ago their monopoly on the high-margin local phone business would start to crumble? So what do the carriers do in response? They battle back with an uncreative, destructive, ill-conceived strategy: downstream fees and tollgates. This may be a short-term fix for the carriers but think about how this scheme/scam is going to hurt innovation. If the Internet is no longer a super highway but a toll road, how will the U.S. be able to rely on technology to remain globally competitive? If the U.S. Congress has any vision as its re-makes the Telecommunications Act, it has to push back at the carriers when it comes to net neutrality. Maybe the carriers are just looking for a political bone to make their lives easier; but maybe they’re really desperate enough to think tollgates are their economic salvation. Whatever their motivations, it’s just stinks.
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Stephen says:
So, I pay my telco for super-duper high speed access, go to my favorite site to stream some content in real time only to find out because they haven’t forked over the fee to my ISP I can only download at a slower speed than what i paid for. I hope they fully disclose that the speed you pay for is not avail unless that content provider is a “preferred” provider.
I can see that this will lock out the samll players who are really the ones that come up with anything innovative.
January 17th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Evans says:
yes, that’s the scenario the carriers are trying to create. clearly, there are significant flaws in this strategy.
mark
January 17th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Inglix the Mad says:
The mob would be envious of the Bell’s cojones here. A fair chunk of their network was built with federal tax dollars. I want my money back then, I’m sure every member of my family, and most of the rest of the country would as well.
Gah! This reminds me of that BS they tried to pull in the early 90’s claiming that Internet users were burdening the local telephone network and thus Internet users should have to pay more. That was debunked.
I swear, when they broke AT&T into seperate companies, they should have taken away ALL of the physical wires/cables from these greedy twits and let them bid on phone service with others over the wires our taxes paid for.
I won’t argue with Cable, at least in my town they paid for all their equipment. The bells should shut up about “their network” because it’s not theirs in the first place.
January 17th, 2006 at 9:34 pm