Hm. Kick me in a few days if I haven't responded to this in greater detail -- I have too much to do tonight to dive into this as deeply as I would like to -- but here are a few observations:
- It seems silly to me that people are having these discussions at all, given that some ridiculous majority of the fiber in the world is still dark. This is one of those problems that, at least in terms of resources, seems like it ought to be a non-problem, and yet it is. Okay, some of it is a last-mile problem, but not all of it -- three years ago here in Leuven they took up all the sidewalks and laid fiber to all the buildings, yet I'm still on WiMax because ... why?
- I suspect that a lot of the concern about net neutrality actually comes from concerns over how the game has played out in the mobile space. The big telco players have a deadlock on the available spectrum and they like this whole notion of renting trickles of it back to users on locked-down platforms. (And why shouldn't they? It makes them boatloads of money.) But now the boundary between "mobile" and "wireless" is blurring, and this Matters to mobile providers -- every packet that goes over wifi is a packet they're not expending spectrum on. Can you imagine the uproar if Sprint started fingerprinting packets that came from iPhones (probably not that difficult of a task) and routing them at a lower priority? Verizon and AT&T would fall all over themselves advocating for network neutrality.
- The remark immediately previous went a very different direction from what I had originally intended, which was to point out that with the advent of devices like the iPad, and walled-garden networks rather than walled-garden services, the threat of a get-em-coming-and-going model for bandwidth in general is suddenly much more real, and there are those of us who are very concerned about what that means for freedom of speech, particularly since (as I like to keep harping) the spectrum is supposed to be a public resource -- and it very much isn't, thanks to nearly a hundred years of the FCC managing it as if it were scarcer than it is.
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Date: 2010-03-07 04:36 pm (UTC)- It seems silly to me that people are having these discussions at all, given that some ridiculous majority of the fiber in the world is still dark. This is one of those problems that, at least in terms of resources, seems like it ought to be a non-problem, and yet it is. Okay, some of it is a last-mile problem, but not all of it -- three years ago here in Leuven they took up all the sidewalks and laid fiber to all the buildings, yet I'm still on WiMax because ... why?
- I suspect that a lot of the concern about net neutrality actually comes from concerns over how the game has played out in the mobile space. The big telco players have a deadlock on the available spectrum and they like this whole notion of renting trickles of it back to users on locked-down platforms. (And why shouldn't they? It makes them boatloads of money.) But now the boundary between "mobile" and "wireless" is blurring, and this Matters to mobile providers -- every packet that goes over wifi is a packet they're not expending spectrum on. Can you imagine the uproar if Sprint started fingerprinting packets that came from iPhones (probably not that difficult of a task) and routing them at a lower priority? Verizon and AT&T would fall all over themselves advocating for network neutrality.
- The remark immediately previous went a very different direction from what I had originally intended, which was to point out that with the advent of devices like the iPad, and walled-garden networks rather than walled-garden services, the threat of a get-em-coming-and-going model for bandwidth in general is suddenly much more real, and there are those of us who are very concerned about what that means for freedom of speech, particularly since (as I like to keep harping) the spectrum is supposed to be a public resource -- and it very much isn't, thanks to nearly a hundred years of the FCC managing it as if it were scarcer than it is.