The Net Neutrality conversation at NetSquared circled around issues of content ownership. And within this conversation lurked another harsh question: who owns the Internet? And could the people who own the various pipes and connections of the Internet implement the controls under debate at any time?
Cable is structured as an information service, and claims to own the content inside the pipes. Telecommunications providers on the other hand, own the pipe but not the content. And now, they'd like to have the content too. This complements the strategic move by networking vendors like Cisco, which want to place intelligence in the middle of the network. (I heard that Tim Wu has a great paper called The Broadband Debate: A User's Guide which lays out the issues here, so there's homework to do.) Large telcos have enough Internet ownership to control content now, but competitive pressure has kept things fairly neutral.
This isn't just a community battle - there's corporate interest in developing companies that are neutral relative to the telcos. Content vendors like Amazon and MSN, for example, believe that information should be placed at the edges of the network. Smaller, newer access providers like the idea of large competitors trying to manage both the pipeline and the content - it will drive over those users who want freedom of content. AOL learned lessons here in the early 1990s - it used to be that the only content that you could access on AOL was AOL's content, but AOL ended up folding to competitive pressure and letting the Web in.
Back to ownership: Most people submit to the premise that if you create content, you own it. Given this, why should AT&T get to make a claim on that content simply based on their transmission of it? Is the telco effort a back door to becoming a media company?
There ought to be a market-based solution for the issue. People are charged for (and are accustomed to paying for) extra bandwidth today. What network vendors want to do instead, though, is to look at content and decide how high a priority it is. What alternative would enable access providers to post good numbers, while preserving Internet freedoms?
Today's dialogue supported the thesis that net neutrality matters, but we ended up posting questions rather than answers.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys netsquared net2 net neutrality technology
