How have we in the US got to the point where we let the evil run our country?

Imagine a world with “tiered internet” (the opposite of net neutrality). Say you download via iTunes (like most people) – if Apple refuses to pay their backbone provider for priority, then anything coming from it is relegated to the “slow lane.” Then, podcasts would come in slower. If they DO pay for access to the fast lane, there are two outcomes from your perspective: podcasts download faster, but Apple would probably pass along the extra cost to you.

As I said above, the backbone providers who are asking for more money from content providers are being greedy. They have been paid three times already to transfer data to us via their networks.

For those who argue that people should pay more for a fast lane, that argument is a non-starter as well. Websites already pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. If they pay for more, they get more. You already pay for bandwidth. If you pay more (for Cable instead of dail-up) you get more.

In essence: backbone companies who want a tiered internet are simply being greedy and selfish. If they really want people to pay more for access to their pipes, they should charge more on both ends.

http://www.askaninja.com/news/2006/05/11/ask-a-ninja-special-delivery-4-net-neutrality

The US is already way behind other countries in the race for universal broadband access. If we had the infrastructure for affordable universal wireless broadband access we could participate in the brave new world of network accessed application development.

Without the broadband infrastructure to homes and phones we will pass the innovation baton to other countries.

Ebooks haven’t taken off yet, but if Stephen King could distribute his novels electronically with an advertising model, rather than conventional book sales, generating revenue, then he could earn far more revenue in the year of a book’s introduction than a run-of-the-mill, video-on-demand porn site, even though the porn site might require far more bandwidth to earn its annual revenue.

If bandwidth were the point, services like Vonage and Skype would be focus of infrastructure provider attention, but when I hear infrastructure providers discuss the issue, they talk about Yahoo and Google, not Vonage and Skype. Infrastructure providers want more of the ad revenue from content providers. That’s all. It’s about the ad revenue, not about the traffic. Content providers/receivers pay for network access roughly in proportion to the volume of bytes they provide/receive. If they don’t, infrastructure providers have a much more legitimate grievance, but I assume they do.

Cleland’s rebuttal of the “telecom mafia” rhetoric was reasonable. It’s not like all the fat-cat bad guys own the pipes and all the angels provide the content. On the other hand, Cleland’s rants about “keeping the government out of the market” are equally disingenuous, as was his plea on behalf of consumers. Consumers always pay, whether or not ad revenue flows to the telecom mafia rather than the content mafia. I’m not any happier with Ed Whitaker’s mansion, assuming that he has one, than with Michael Jackson’s. We need a progressive consumption tax, but that’s an entirely different program.

That said, even if discriminatory pricing is about channeling ad revenue to infrastructure development (and telecom baron castles), it’s fair to ask, “Why not?” Most of us who use the net a lot want the fatter pipes. We want video on demand and similar services. I do [i]not[/i] want content policemen reading every word crossing the net, regardless of why they’re doing it, and that’s the legitimate issue. I also don’t want a network structured to limit content providers to entities with explicit contracts to provide particular content and a few bandwidth owners essentially licensing content. I don’t want content filtered through exhaustive negotiations between lawyers representing the bandwidth providers and lawyers representing content providers. This path leads to an expansion of the corporative state.