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Cable Control of Broadband Bad for the Net
imsmith writes "The ACLU announced the conclusions of a study done to determine the impact of the cable industry (as a broadband service provider) on the Internet. The announcement is here, and so is the study. No surprise, they conclude cable monopolies are bad for online freedom, consumer choice, and the Internet in general."
Look, it doesn't matter whether the bits travel over the air or inside of wire, the problems is the same; the bits will be traveling over somebody else's air or wire. That somebody must either use their position as the carrier to control the communications to their own favor, or they will be economically run out of the market by some other somebody who does (and does it better). Your ability to 'win' this game (as a consumer) has nowhere to go but down.
There are at least three solutions to this problem:
Cultural Layer: Everyone agrees to cultural norms which say it's not fair to take advantage of your position to economically better yourself. People who violate these cultural standards are shunned out of the society.
Financial Layer: This would involve something like per-packet charging. Under this system, it doesn't matter what your packet is carrying, as long as you pay your bills.
Political Layer: Under this system, it becomes illegal to discriminate against a packet, passing one while blocking another. Think of this as "free speech for packets".
In the early days of the Internet, (prior to August '93) things were kept under control by cultural norms. Spamming violated these norms, and was kept under control because of it. We no longer have those cultural norms to keep people in line. It was killed by the spammers and their kin.
We don't yet have the micro-payment infrastructure which would be required to make a financial layer solution work. We're trying to cobble something like this together to keep the World Wide Web alive with things like click-through ads, but it's not working very well.
But throughout all of this, the phone system (remember that?) has kept on chugging because the network providers are prevented (by the equal access/common carrier laws) from blocking, limiting, or degrading the voice channels (narrow band). These laws are the foundation of a political layer solution which now offers the only hope of survival for the Internet as we know it.
If the FCC continues on it's brain-dead course of allowing network providers to choose which packets they'll pass and which ones they won't, the Internet will continue to implode. Those who stick around will find themselves back on CompuServe in the Bad Old Days.
Even after the Internet is run into the ground, FidoNet will survive.
If you support Free Speech, you'll want a Political Layer solution, or a Financial Layer solution.
If you don't trust Governments, you'll want a Financial Layer solution or a Cultural Layer solution.
If you don't trust haxors, you'll want to avoid Cultural Layer solutions and Political Layer solutions.
If you want a free (beer) Internet, you'll want a Cultural Layer solution or a Political Layer solution.
If you're a spammer, clearly you want a Political Layer solution, but you'll settle for a Cultural Layer solution as long as the rest of the people on the Internet will continue to let you get away with murder.
If you're anti-spam, you're either begging for a Financial Layer solution, or you're going to have to take some responsibility for shunning spammers (and their like) who view the Internet as a place where they can ignore social norms and enrich themselves.
It begs the old Nortel question, "What do you want the Internet to be?"
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.