Thursday, July 06, 2006

This highway may have a toll booth ahead...

There is a lot of noise about net neutrality in the air. Your Internet Service Providers(ISPs) want to charge the biggies on the internet for hogging bandwidth. The fight is on between Comcast, AT&T ... Vs. Microsoft,Yahoo,Google ... and the arena is the US Congress. Senators and congressmen will decide who gets the bigger slice of the pie. No matter what, the lobbyists will get their share.

If we breakdown the case for net neutrality, the ISPs demand can be compared to the government charging Walmart, Target and Macys because their customers use public roads to drive up to their shops. If Walmart pays the additional fee, their customers can drive at say 10mph faster than others. These customers are charged seperately in taxes and toll booths that pepper the freeways just like we the monthly charges that we pay for our dial-up/DSL/cable internet connection. The ISPs will decide which website/page will download faster based on how much the website's owner is willing to pay.

Some may argue that the TV channels operate this way. You have to pay for premium channels and try to apply this logic to internet. I say that it is not a fair comparison because internet is not just an information dissemination medium. Its much more that that.Its interactive. Its an extension of our society. Its a place where we share values and beliefs,buy and sell services, gain and share knowledge, a place for philanthropy and misanthropy.

It maybe a little late for the ISPs to demand this. But they definitely will because the ISP oligopoly sees green. They definitely will try hard for they have the muscle to do so. The ISPs know that the Net companies are dependent on them to deliver content to the end user. But they also see what most of us do not see. To treat each information packet as a product that can be 'taxed'. For example, information flowing from Europe or Asia can be charged an access fee to enter the US market.

In the end, if they succeed its us(internet users,entrepreneurs,innovators ) who lose. An innovative network of home wireless networks maybe the alternative if ISPs succeed.

But the pie actually belongs to us. Not Microsoft, not Google, not Comcast, not AT&T and I have been paying for the pie every month(not counting the first few where I used my neighbour's network :)).

Some articles on net neutrality:
Lawrence Lessig : Founder of Creative Commons
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702108.html

Tim Berners Lee: Inventor of Internet/ chairman of WorldWideWeb consortium
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

and the mighty source of info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

3 comments:

Rekha said...

hey, talking the desi way, maybe we need some reservations for developing countries teeming with religious fanatics

Anonymous said...

You might find this article interesting. It is tracing the origin of the debate on Net Neutrality. Interesting read indeed!

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17138

Imagine the amount of money involved if they start attaching price tags to each site! We are talking about zillions of sites and the amount involved is mind boggling!

Anonymous said...

Sorry.. here is the updated link
Article on Net Neutrality