There's an article [requires registration, sorry] by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe from a couple of days ago making the rounds. It reports on yet another assault by incumbent telecom providers on the open internet. We need to leave these dinosaurs in the dust.
Here's their plan: to provide tiered access to online services. ”Regular” internet access would be pokey; “premium” access would be fast enough to allow for a good video experience; and no competing services would be allowed on the “premium internet.” Of course, the “premium” whatever – let's just go ahead and call it a “channel,” because this is just a dumb broadcast model plunked onto online life, borrowed from the mobile phone world – would not be the internet. There would be no place for start-ups who couldn't afford to pay their way in; consumer choice would be sharply limited; and walled gardens would be the order of the day.
BellSouth says this:
''When costs are being driven into an equation, they have to be recovered somewhere,” said Bill Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth. ''Why do fundamental business economics not apply to the Internet?”
BellSouth and the others say they won't be able to provide high-speed access unless they can be confident they can monetize their networks — and avoid competition for their video and voice services.
They wouldn't be able to do this if we had more choices for broadband access. These companies are able to act like monopolists — raising prices for what should be commodity services — because they don't have competition. That's why the first move has to be to find alternative routes online.
The hard question is: how unhappy will Americans be with comfortable, broadcast-style, fully-packaged-and-protected highspeed access? Maybe not unhappy enough to revolt.
Meanwhile, Chairman Martin plans to take yet another legacy disaster, the Universal Service Fund, and have it siphon off funds from online applications. It's unclear how this will work, but recently proposed legislation would levy fees on any use of IP addresses.
According to the CNET story,
The mammoth fund–$4.7 billion was distributed during the first nine months of this year–has been beset by charges of mismanagement and fraud during its seven-year history.
So: Graft, fraud, taxes, slowed services, and walled-garden control. Someone on Capitol Hill needs to remember that the internet came to be the economic engine that it is because we restrained ourselves from acting this way. America should be leading the world in its enlightened approach to the internet — instead, we seem to be falling farther and farther behind.