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| Wednesday, April 12, 2006 |
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The Net, more or less 
| | There is a big difference between the rivers and oceans and the Internet. The former were created by God. I realize and respect many do not feel the rivers and oceans were created by God. The point is they have no owner who actively enforced property rights. |
| | The Internet infrastructure was created by man, namely investors. In this way the Internet is more like a canal, dug by someone who put the risk capital forward to make it happen. It is not yours to take. |
| | On the one hand, there's a big difference between the Internet (first paragraph) and the infrastructure on which it depends (second paragraph). Unfortunately, it's easier to understand and describe (and legislate on behalf of) the latter than the former. |
| | On the other hand, I believe Andrew has a good point. There will be unintended consequences of Net Neutrality legislation. Imagining those consequences argues against it. |
| | (Curious to see what Andrew's position will be if the final telecom legislation amounts to carrier protectionism.) |
| | Those in favor of Net Neutrality should think in terms of Eminent Domain. What are you willing to pay the carriers to remove their right to use their networks as they see fit? |
| | If you are not willing to do this, then prepare to fund a parallel public infrastructure. This would be analogous to building an Interstate Highway System adjacent to pre-existing toll roads. Some municipalities are doing this already. |
| | However, the last thing people should consider is expropriating the assets of the telecom industry. Nationalizing the use of these assets without compensation is something that Lenin himself once spoke of, when he advocated government control of the "Commanding Heights" of an economy — steel, coal and railroads. This is not a future I want for our nation. |
| | I favor the second option, along with parallel private infrastructures, built and run by companies that can imagine a greater range of business opportunities than those currently contemplated by the duopoly carriers. |
| | I've always felt Net Neutrality is a concept that expropriates the property rights of carriers in order to allow media and content companies a free-ride on their infrastructure. Google, Yahoo and other media and content companies lack ownership of a layer-one digital right of way to the consumer- so the easiest approach is to legislate the theft of it. |
| | This has never been the case for Net Neutrality. If it was, it would have had no backers at all. The problem here, as I see it, is the re-framing of Google and Yahoo as "media content companies", and of the Net as little more than a content transport system that exists mostly to move goods from a few big producers to billions of consumers. Unfortunately, both those companies have also contributed to that reframing. |
| | The Net is about much more than carriage, and it is a mistake to reduce it to that. But as long as we continue to describe the whole in terms of just some of its parts, that reduction will continue. |
Taking steps
| | Many years ago, a friend (who is far more versed in religious practices than I) explained that the monastic side of the Roman Catholic Church (and probably of others as well) was "the wide open spaces", while the visible and active church was relatively closed. This seemed odd to me, since the monastic life seems highly restricted. Yet there must be something to it, or the attraction wouldn't be there, no? |
| | Perhaps the answer can come form Andrew, a 19-year-old computer science major considering life as a Benedictine monk. His blog is From the Slype to the Garth. |
| | By the way, lest one think the monastic life less compatible with literature than with liturgy, consider the life and work of Thomas Merton. |
Can't tell you, Mom. It's classified.
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