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Friday, June 9, 2006
Down but not out 
| | IP Democracy runs a bunch of quotes from various partisans on the matter of Net Neutrality, after the pro-Neutrality Markey Amendment was shot down on mostly partisan (Democrats for, Republicans against) lines, while the bill it failed to amend passed by better than a 3-to-1 margin. The bill, says the New York Times, followed "the policy agenda of the nation's largest telephone companies.". |
| | The bill (H.R.5252, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006, or COPE) contains net neutrality measures that some call "watered down". |
| | Whatever. The bill was never about Net Neutrality. It was mostly about allowing phone companies to horn in on Cable's television business. Remember television? For that matter, remember the telephone? My point exactly. |
| | On the plus side, Net Neutrality got geeks interested in politics. Also, Congress bucked the citizens on this one. Citizens have hated the phone companies for the duration, and cable companies for nearly as long. Net Neutrality may have been poorly defined, but citizens taking an interest in both the Net and politics can easily see the carriers' "pro-business" anti-Neutrality rhetoric for the bullshit it is. Yes, we need the government to stay out of the free marketplace, and to let the market sort out winners and losers. Right. But this bill wasn't about that. It was about re-landscaping a playing field that was never flat in the first place, and never will be, as long as Congress is in charge of it. |
| | Fortunately, the Net isn't in that playing field. Just the "last mile" of it is, as long as that mile runs through cable or phone companies. |
| | The Internet is not a phone service, and it isn't a TV channel. It can run on anything you can tack on poles, pull through conduit or transmit through the aether. |
| | We'll never get Net Neutrality from the carriers, from lawmakers or from regulators. But we can get it from each other, in the form of new businesses that can grow skyscrapers in the market holes the carriers choose to ignore. Let's start focusing on that. |
| | Oh, one more thing. The bill that passed the house flipped a large bird in the general direction of the nation's municipalities, which have held franchising authority over local video services for a long time. There are cases to be made against that authority, and the carriers have been doing a good job making them. But, as Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. Nothing is more local than a customer who wants a choice between something more than the two usual suspects, and watches Congress reduce that choice. That's what just happened. And it will backfire on the carriers. |
Shinkick
Identifying topics for the Identity Mashup
| | Mashing Up a Commons is new essay I just put up over at Linux Journal. It's a pretty big one: almost 3,000 words. But asks a big question: Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? |
| | The short answer, I think, is no. |
| | Creative Commons and related efforts have gone a long way toward building out the kind of infrastructure we need before the Net is a truly public space, rather than a vast collection of private ones. But we need more. |
| | I have some ideas about that, which I think are good to bring up ten days in advance of the Identity Mashup, which the Berkman Center is putting on at Harvard Law School. I'll be participating in that, and in Cambridge that whole week (although I'm mighty tempted to head West for Bloggercon). And I thought, given the speed at which things are moving toward Identity 2.0, the Identity Metasystem — or whatever else we end up calling it — that it would be good to start talking ahead of time about some of the ideas that we'll bring up there. Talking, that is, out here in The Commons. Or whateve we have that passes for one. |
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