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Friday, June 16, 2006
What's more 
Beautiful:
| | When you look up Searls on Google's Image Search, Colette comes up tops (for the shot here). |
Cool.
A public park filled with private walled gardens? Or vice versa?
| | Tom Evslin nails a number of problems with Net Neutrality, while not sparing the carriers, either. Be sure to read the comments, too. They start with one from Richard Bennett. In this post on his own blog Richard points to this Wharton report, which for the most part I agree with. |
| | The key point is Tom's. What we need is competition. The carriers are lobbying for selective regulation that will clear the way to create de facto monopolies on virtually infinite bandwidth, which they can divvy up and throttle any way they like, creating artificial scarcities for billing purposes. Lots of good perspective on this subject comes from Bob Frankston, in Why Settle for just 1%? and Carriers: Their Service vs. Our Infrastructure! |
| | Do you want General Motors to buy up America's roads, and prevent you from driving on them if you have a Honda? Do you want Sony to own our power lines, and charge extra to power up non-Sony appliances? Do you want Continental and United to own all the airports, and charge USAir and Jet Blue planes exorbitant prices to take off and land there? It just doesn't make sense for the government to give the utility companies control over the content and applications that run on top of the network backbone. Internet connectivity should remain a utility-like, common carrier infrastructure. This "Barton bill" should be voted down, or the Markey Net Neutrality amendment to it supported, despite its flaws. Or, give me my money back, AT&T. |
| | I thought her post hyperbolic and overreaching, until I turned on my Sirius Satellite Radio this morning. |
| | The problem is, I like Sirius. I like the fact that I can hear Steve Gillmor, yours truly and other people I know on Sirius 102, right above Howard 100 and 101, where I get to enjoy Howard Stern, Scotty Ferrall and other exiles from terrestrial radio, where they were fined and censored off the air by the FCC, which found them "indecent". |
| | Sirius, however, is a silo. It's private. It's not public. It's spaces are finite, but they're far more wide-open that the public airwaves have been ever since Congress, the Supreme Court and the FCC all agreed, long ago, that the First Amendment doesn't apply there. It's just the container cargo we call "content" (check the file name in the URL at the last link) and it can be regulated and controlled just like we do with trucking. |
| | See, the private zones are relatively free, while the public ones are not. And private zones are the ones the carriers want clearance to create. |
| | We're not even close to knowing, much less agreeing, on What's Going to Happen after any of this legislation passes. |
| | This much I'm sure about: the Internet won't get much respect from companies for which the it is just another TV channel. |
| | Bonus link, with a killer quote: We wouldn't be talking about this if there were real competition at the last-mile level. |
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