Net Neutrality News
by Matt Stoller, Mon Jun 26, 2006 at 07:57:52 PM EDT
On the eve of tomorrow's mark-up, here's a final update on some of the heavy hitters coming out on the issue.
Boingboing proprietor Cory Doctorow has an important column on telco welfare.
It's high-minded and nice-sounding, but there are few industries that owe their existence to regulation as much as the carriers. These companies are gigantic corporate welfare bums, having received the invaluable boon of a set of rights-of-way leading into every basement in America. Phone companies have a legal right to force you to provide access to your home for their pipes. Try calculating what it would cost to get into every U.S. home without a regulator clearing your path, and you quickly realize that the carriers should be the last people complaining about the distorting effect of regulation on their business.The Bells and cable companies owe their existence to governmental largesse, and, while they're profit-making private firms, they are, in effect, quasigovernmental organizations. A Bell that wants to get rid of regulation is about as practical as a cotton-candy cone that wants to get rid of sugar. Bells are nothing but a thin veneer of arrogance wrapped around a regulatory monopoly.
And Larry Lessig boils this discussion down to a matter of character:
One clue to this Net Neutrality debate is to watch what kind of souls are on each side of the debate. The pro-NN contingent is filled with the people who actually built the Net -- from Vint Cerf to Google to eBay -- and those who profit from the competition enabled by the Net -- e.g., Microsoft. The anti-NN contingent is filled with the entities that either never got the Net, or fought like hell to control it -- telecom, and cable companies. (The one clear exception to this is Dave Farber, who has been described as the "Grandfather of the Net." I've never understood either what that description could mean, nor have I understood how he gets from the premises in his argument to its conclusions. But to be fair, this is an exception to the rule I'm describing.)Here's the latest confirmation of this pattern. Tim Berners-Lee has blogged before about this issue. But here's a video he's now down to emphasize its importance
And finally, John Doerr, who is probably the most influential and important venture capitalist of all time, chimes in with Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix.
What seems to be happening is that the pro-innovation and generally libertarian side of the economy is moving into the pro-net neutrality camp. I think this is because they recognize the deep threat to innovation and openness that the large telecom companies pose.
That's something lawmakers should take into account tomorrow.
Tags: net neutrality (all tags)
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