Every time I dip a toe into the reality-distortion field that is Washington, DC, it make my head spin. I was just in Washington for an API seminar, and it happened again.
Washington has the world's largest collection of special-interest spinmeisters trying to warp the political agenda.
Wherever you go, there are TV commercials, newspaper ads, billboards, selling something that's ultimately targeted at Congress and the pseudolegislative machinery of regulatory bureaucrats. Nobody tries to sell ladies' underwear in the Washington Post any more. Instead, these these ads sell poison, depicting an alternate universe in which facts have been rewritten to the advantage of one power-hungry cartel or another.
As I dissected a Comfort Inn waffle for breakfast I encountered a big display ad in the Washington Post, and later as I flipped on the TV I was hit by a video ad with the same message from a mysterious "public interest" group: Those evil people at Google are conspiring to rob all of us by keeping us from having more video choices just when Santa Claus was going to crawl through our broadband connections with lots of new goodies. Google wants consumers to pay! Google is a giant California technomonster (cut to a photo of the sprawling Googleplex headquarters). Stop Congress from regulating the Internet!
I think I know who's picking my pocket, and it ain't Google.
It's the big cable and telcos that are behind this fake grassroots movement, spreading this lie in an attempt to stop net neutrality.
Until now, the Internet has been a fast, basically unmetered, level playing field where new ideas can be easily tried. Ideas like Skype (free telephony), YouTube (free video sharing), Shoutcast (free audio channels).
The cable and telcos want to be able to selectively discriminate against content providers that do not pay tribute or become business partners.
These price-gouging monopolists are no friend of you and me. They want the "freedom" to selectively degrade certain Internet services, especially realtime streaming media such as audio, video and telephony unless the content providers pony up and pay for guaranteed performance.
For entrepreneurial, individual and peer-to-peer multimedia, this means death. And that death is to the advantage of cable and telcos, which have their own programming and telephony services they want to sell you.
The net effect would be to turn back the clock to a pre-Internet era when a few powerful corporations controlled what we could see and how we could see it. That's not hyperbole. It's the goal. If you don't believe the cable giants are against individual publishing, read your broadband terms of service.
Content providers do pay for Internet service, as do consumers, and the cable and telcos aren't going to stop charging for broadband. They just want even more money.
How can they do that? Isn't the Internet huge, and competitive?
The Internet is very big, but the cable companies -- and it is primarily cable companies who provide the "last mile" broadband connections into the home -- have control of key choke points.
If they are allowed to demand tribute from everyone who wants to offer fat content or provide streaming services to their customers, it will come at the expense of every individual who tries to watch, listen, or talk on the net.
Comments
Net Neutrality
Steve, one thing I thought I should take a moment to point out to you is that while it has become popular to label campaigns such as the Hands Off The Internet campaign as "fake", we clearly state on our homepage exactly who our coalition members are. There is no hiding of our identities.
As to your points on the debate, let me raise this question. Under the status quo, when I go home and pick up my VOIP phone line, stream a video from YouTube showing the World Cup goals I missed while at work today, all while downloading a new album I just bought off of iTunes, I pay exactly the same rate as my neighbor who logs in, checks her email, and logs off.
Clearly, I'm putting exponentially more strain on the pipes than my neighbor--I'm online all the time, downloading huge files left and right, and using my VOIP telephone constantly. My neighbor, who is simply not much of an internet person, checks her email twice a week and that's it.
We both pay the same for internet access. Now, while, to me, that's great, to her, that really isn't fair. She's subsidizing my extreme usage of the internet, in essence paying part of my bill for me.
Red herring
We have had graded Internet access for years. It is not a problem. If all I want is to check my mail I can get free dialup access from Juno. If I want something faster I can buy always-on "DSL Lite" service from Bellsouth for 25 bucks (if I have and maintain a Bellsouth dialup line, which is rapidly becoming a dead business). It's capped at 256K but that's plenty fast for grabbing mail and browsing websites. It's four times as fast as the $20,000 frame-relay Internet connection I put in at the Star Tribune in 1993.
This debate began when cable-telecom giants began talking about instituting a whole new pricing model, one that can single out specific types of content, such as Skype and Youtube, that threaten their CATV and telephony businesses.
This isn't about usage and volume and metering scarce resources; any scarcity will take care of itself without violating the principle of content neutrality.
The real issue is gross abuse of monopoly power. Very few markets have anything approaching a competitive local-access scene. And the providers that do exist? Telephone companies and cable TV operators, both trying to protect their other lines of business.