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RE: it ain't neutral
Actually, it was Ed Whiteacre of SBC (now AT&T) who said they wanted to be able to charge Google more, even though Google pays plenty -- "market rates", no doubt -- for the heavy load they place on whatever backbones they connect to. Privately, the carriers say that they really don't plan to create slow and fast backbone lanes, because it would be too big a pain in the butt. However they do say that the threat of Net Neutrality restricts investment. I think that's pure FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), and a self-fulfilling prophesy. Wall Street is certainly good right now at punishing the most aggressive deployer of fiber (Verizon) while rewarding AT&T, which has backed off on fiber plans. And fiber is what we need most, before we unwire everything with wireless everywhere. Did I say I was for tiered service speeds? In my ideal world, which is achievable, we would all have more capacity than we could use. That's why fiber is so important. And why there is no good analogy for what happens when you deploy fiber to as many locations as possible. But as the carriers know, you can play scarcity games with the Net, but the Net itself doesn't play scarcity games. At least not like the carriers do. Because the Net is just a way to connect anything with anything. What matters most is connection, not capacity. Still, we're used to thinking in terms of capacity, and capacity is a red herring. Twelve years ago Dave Winer said "Remember the mantra -- repeat after me -- market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip, market share is a head trip. Market share is a head trip. Uh huh." Same goes for "broadband", "capacity" and "speed". Those aren't what count most. Wht counts most is connectivity. What counts second is abundance -- including ubiquity. Port blockages and tiered plans may make sense in a carrier-defined world, but there are better ways to define the world, to deploy the Net and to leverage the abundance of customer relationships that the carriers still have. In the long run they will find better ways to make money than by playing the same scarcity game that Ma Bell invented more than a century ago. Still, we can no more imagine those non-scarcity businesses than we could imagine the Internet back when the only way we could communicate and collaborate was through AOL, Compuserve, The Well and Prodigy. Nothing wrong with any of those; but they weren't the Net. Net Neutrality is a huge distraction and energy-suck. There is huge fear, distrust and non-communication between the forces of Neutrality and the carriers fighting it. We are having political arguments in places where technical ones have barely started, much less finished. Anyway, I just posted this. See what you think. There are responses to this message:
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