Tim Berners-Lee Wades Into Neutrality Debate
As the war rages on whether ISPs can slap tollgates on Internet traffic to generate additional revenue, Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the World Wide Web) wades into the debate with a plea for the U.S. Congress to protect Net Neutrality. While it's nice to have Internet pioneers such as Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf and leading players such as eBay and Google throw their support behind Net Neutrality, this has become a political battle with the well-financed ISPs (BellSouth, AT&T, etc.) and their lobbyists putting the hammer down in Washington. Sure, you can talk about why Net Neutrality is important to innovation and maintaining an open access environment but there's an awful lots of money at stake, which often takes precedence over ideals or ideologies. The economic reality is the carriers are losing lots and lots of high-margin local telephone customers as VoIP becomes more mainstream. As a result, they argue they have to make it up somewhere if they want to remain vibrant and profitable. With an army of lobbyists at their disposal, they've done a great job convincing many politicians about their "plight". While Berners-Lee is well-respected, it's going to be a huge challenge waging war against money-hungry carriers with lots of political clout.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Money-hungry carriers with lots of political clout? C'mon Mark… you're starting to sound communist there. Nobody calls you a money-hungry journalist because you choose to get paid.
If net-neutrality people think they have a better business model, let them put in their own networks. Then, they can decide how they charge for services. But that isn't what they want.
They want carriers to give up the right to charge what the market will bear for a competitive service. Or they want my tax dollars to be used for a city to compete against the private sector.
Snap quiz: name a public sector civil works project since the beginning of time that has ever been run as well and maintained as well - long run - as the private sector?
June 23rd, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Indeed, Mark's comments raise very valid points. Do we really want to forgo the free market here in order to turn the internet over to the government?
The very nature of the internet screams against this–the internet is fast-paced, constantly changing, and innovates almost by itself faster than we can keep up with. Can you imagine putting something such as that into the hands of one of the largest, slowest moving bureaucratic bodies on the face of the planet? It just doesn't make sense.