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arstechnica.com/,....a good read,....Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality: "This is serious."
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ireland
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24 Jun 2006 3:39 PM
Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality: "This is serious."
6/23/2006 6:31:08 PM, by Jon Hannibal Stokes
The inventor of the WWW has a short, to-the-point post that explains exactly why supporting real, bona fide net neutrality is the Right Thing to Do. I absolutely encourage you to read the entire post, but really he sums up the whole argument for net neutrality in his opening sentence:
When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.
If you think about it in terms of start-ups having to ask the permission of AT&T to innovate, then the whole net neutrality issue becomes less complicated.
Ma Bell may I?
What the opponents of net neutrality are pouring millions into lobbying for is a world where, when someone offers a new high-bandwidth service over the Internet, they have to go around to each of the last-mile providers and ask, "may I have permission to compete on a level playing field with the other services that go over your pipes?" And if entrepeneurs can't come up with enough funding to appease the troll that guards that particular bridge, then they could effectively lose access to the customers at the other end.
To move the discussion away from the typical example of high-bandwidth video, let me turn to the example of a new email attachment service, called Pando, that was recently brought to my attention. From what I can tell, Pando is a P2P service for sending very large files through email. You attach to your email a .pando file, which is probably something like a .torrent file, and a user on the other end who has the Pando client can open that .pando file and use it to begin downloading the larger file that you want to send them.
Now, I have no idea how well this Pando thing works, or even if it works at all. I bring it up only because it seems like new, kind of slick start-up idea. But on a non-neutral Internet, Pando is a much less attractive as a small business. Why? Because if I'm on Comcast and you're on AT&T, and I try to send you a .pando file, then both of our ISPs have to have agreed to let this new service's packets through at a reasonable clip.
