You want to keep this revolution going? Be ready to fight for it
April 21st, 2006 by MattSo says Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit.
But things don’t stay open on their own, and there are some signs that the Internet may grow less open in the future. One such sign is the movement by ISPs toward a two-tier Internet where “users would find it easier and quicker to connect to services provided by the companies that paid … fees than others. Invisibly, customers would be steered towards these ‘approved’ services.”
I’m already paying BellSouth for my Internet service, and if they can’t make it faster despite improving technology and lower costs, I plan to take my business elsewhere. I don’t want to see them trying to steer me toward people who pay them under-the-table for better service. But they’ll try, if they’re allowed to get away with it, and this is just the first of many such schemes, I suspect, from all sorts of players. You want to keep this revolution going? Be ready to fight for it.
Sounds about right to me.
April 22nd, 2006 at 10:57 am
Hell, I’m not a fan of Instapundit on most things, but I’m in agreement here. The Internet is perhaps the greatest ‘free market’ experiment out there. Got a business model? Think you can do better than an existing company at providing a service? Go for it — it’s all up to you.
But once you allow content providers to make deals for “preferred” service, that’ll go away. You thought there were too many ads and popups? Just wait… if your favorite blog suddenly had to pay extra to simply be on the map for any given ISP’s customers, money has to come from somewhere. So smaller blogs and websites fold — bigger ones are forced to become more aggressive at getting revenue.
And then you get the nightmarish “exclusive agreement” that the video clip mentions. Well, f!!!, there goes any kind of competition there.
And think about the economy as a whole. What percentage of it depends on internet businesses — businesses that will suddenly have more overhead and vastly decreased customer access? What about the hardware companies… if the Internet is more expensive for a company to use, why would they need servers?
What about a customer from service A tries to access a server on service B? Could a service block access to servers “outside the playground”? Sure. So you end up with isolated communities filled with pissed off people that are used to freedom of access. Brilliant business decision. Absolutely brilliant.
… but they’ll do it anyway, because these days it’s all about TODAY’S bottom line.
April 22nd, 2006 at 12:02 pm
A good primer/resource/action site can be found at Common Cause:
http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=1421497
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
[…] 6:07 PM: A fellow traveler on the World Wide Web points out that Glenn Reynolds has supported Net Neutrality for quite some time. That’s […]