Why neutrality is more important than connection speeds
David Isenberg's posted the text of "Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat," a speech he gave to the Broadband Properties Summit this week, arguing that the most salient characteristic of the Internet is that it allows anyone to deploy any app or service, and that we lost that when we concentrate on making it "broadband" or what-have-you.
This talk is a 30,000-foot view of why our work is important. I'm going to argue that the Internet is the main value creator here - not our ability to digitize everything, not high speed networking, not massive storage - the Internet. With this perspective, maybe you'll you go back to work with a slight attitude adjustment, and maybe one or two concrete things to do.Broadband without Internet ain't worth squatIn the big picture, We're building interconnectedness. We're connecting every person on this planet with every other person. We're creating new ways to share experience. We're building new ways for buyers to find sellers, for manufacturers to find raw materials, for innovators to rub up against new ideas. We're creating a new means to distribute our small planet's limited resources.
Let's take a step back from the ducts and splices and boxes and protocols. Let's go on an armchair voyage in the opposite direction -- to a strange land . . . to right here, right now, but without the Internet.
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Yeah well it doesn't matter. Eventually they'll do for the internet what they did for cable. Slice it up in order to make more money. Then make the public pay them for doing it (known as a reach around). And the politicians and the media will all say my how wonderful our new internet is.
David Isenberg says: "We know, at some level, there's more than business and economics at stake."
Let me pose a counter-quote, from "Mister Jalopy" in Mark's post yesterday: "Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate."
This seems like the crux of optimism or pessimism on this issue to me. Either the People In Charge will know, at some level, there's more than business and economics at stake. Or they won't. If they do, the world will be a better place. If they don't, the internet turns into cable tv.
Maybe they will. I'm enough of an optimist to believe that there's a fair amount of human intelligence and ethics at all levels of the decision making process.
But it wouldn't surprise me if, in the long term, "The Internet" has a cyclical life span. Maybe the WWW protocol internet that we now have and love will turn into a greed-driven, monopolized form of TV, with the big media players owning all the high priority info streams. This is not the end of the world. Before long, bright people will devise and institute an entirely different free, open, and not-at-all-profitable method of communication. Geeks around the world will flock to this new thing, eschewing "the internet" the same way we eschew "tv". After a decade or so, even the dimmest corporate heads will realize that this new thing can be monetized. They call their political buddies, and the cycle will start again.
Is it terrible of me to say that I almost, maybe, just a little, wouldn't mind it so much if the internet was a bit more controlled/censored? Mind you this statement is coming from a very sensitive person who is just really tired of having websites with naked whores pop up when I'm trying to browse with StumbleUpon, even though I have it set to "no adult websites." Or, having to see nasty sluts in stupid advertisements all over the place, even though I use AdBlock. But I think it should be a choice- like I would be willing to pay for whatever "version" of the internet there could be for people like me who never wanted things like that coming up. And yeah, it's easy for people to be like "just ignore that stuff" but when you're paying a good bit of money to use a service, should you really have to ignore things? Seems unfair.
@ #3:
Yes. Yes it is terrible. For one thing, do you think AdBlock is going to work properly on the controlled and censored "internet?" You may see fewer "naked whores," but you'll have 100 times as many screaming flash ads for credit cards, info-harvesting surveys, and TV shows so insipid as to be more offensive than hard-core pornography. Not to mention that if content you want to access is on venues that include any content, advertising or otherwise, you find offensive, your personal bowdlerizing options will be significantly curtailed.
I would love for us all to pay LESS to get to our messy, dirty, wonderful, OPEN internet, but what you're talking about is indeed terrible.
I hate that we are STILL having to have this conversation- and will for the foreseeable future. Every few months someone is going to try to pass a law somewhere that enables the cable companies to restructure their pricing for ridiculously high margins, using some straw man argument.
In the meantime, nobody is talking about the fact that the disparity between telephone and cable regulation has already granted a monopoly to a few companies, and that competition is rapidly dwindling from the market.
I refuse to subscribe to a disempowering philosophy like "'they' will win in the end", but it is disheartening to see that every month when I pay for my internet access, a part of that goes to funding lobbysists to try and kill the internet that I want access to.
It's interesting to see how the "nightmare" scenario near the end of the speech is similar to the world of cell-phone apps... and how Android and the iPhone are changing that.
Nobody likes walled gardens. Ask the music industry.
So I think there is reason to be hopeful.
Eventually, these companies will provide the services that people want. (They pretty much do right now, and any move away from it sees a lot of negative reaction). Hopefully, the market will ensure that they don't do it at exorbitant prices.