September 4, 2010
The Struggle for What We Already Have
The complications notwithstanding, net neutrality, broadly speaking, is what exists now. Among the many benefits net neutrality brings is that it fosters innovation. The great fear of the net neutrality purists, however, is that without federal rules, the Internet providers will begin cutting deals with content providers to give certain traffic priority over other traffic. For instance, Verizon could cut a deal with YouTube that allowed its videos to stream faster than, say, a Hulu video. Or it could even block Hulu. Or it could begin charging consumers extra for Netflix movies that were of better quality than ordinary streaming. As Harold Feld, Public Knowledge’s legal director, puts it: “Companies do what companies do.”
(Which brings up one of the true oddities about the fervor over net neutrality. Cable television distributors make decisions all the time about what people can see and how much they have to pay for it. If special sports-only tiers aren’t an example of placing some content over other content, I don’t know what is. Yet because it is merely television, and not the sacred Internet, nobody seems to view this practice as a crime against humanity. But I digress.)
You’ll notice, however, Nocera’s discussion is about media distribution from large companies to consumers, not those consumers as producers.
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there is almost nothing more draining I can imagine than having to argue for something you already have. draining.
I do sometimes worry that I’m living in the golden age that future tech writers will speak of, back when anyone with a net connection had access to the whole internet rather than just whatever was selected for them by monopolistic, barely regulated corporations. Although I imagine the “Whole Internet” package may be available … to those who can afford it.
My apologies if I found this via clusterflock in the first place but it’s still a great example nonetheless of how the internet might look if the big boys get together.
Oh, and I’m totally blaming Apple for this if it happens. They’ve made all of this realiseable by making Apps popular.
I think a subtle version of this is the deregulation of the media industry during the Reagan years. once the lid was off, and conglomerations acquired as many news entities as they could, the effectiveness of mainstream American journalism plummeted. it is a prime example of the failure of market driven everything: some things have to be provided for the common good, not just profit margins. journalism is one of them.