Tomorrow, Monday, February 25, 2008, is a big day for the Internet. The US Federal Communication Commission - the FCC - is taking a field trip to Harvard Law School to hold a public hearing on the fate of the Internet. Will telecommunications companies (Comcast, for one) be allowed to decide what information can be transmitted over the net? David Weinberger, an early and perceptive digital sage (see The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything is Miscellaneous, his blog), explains how high the stakes are in "Beyond net neutrality," an op-ed in yesterday's Boston Globe.
It's worth clicking through to get the full effect of David's thinking. Here are 410 words from his piece, under the copyright limit of 500:
...The idea behind Net neutrality is simple: Decisions about what information should move over the Internet most expeditiously should not be made by those who benefit financially from those decisions. The companies that provide the bulk of the nation's Internet connectivity should not be allowed to decide that, for example, YouTube videos are less important than their own Hollywood blockbusters. They should not be allowed to skew the market in favor of large companies by charging for delivering their bits faster than those of a start-up. Net neutrality is basic to keeping the Internet the greatest seedbed of innovation in history.
Comcast has gained FCC focus because it seems to have been blocking the Internet service BitTorrent, which is useful for downloading large files. But what's at stake isn't simply the value of BitTorrent. Rather, it is a struggle between two visions of the Internet...
Comcast and the other major Internet access providers see the Internet as a way to broadcast content to users. Its value comes from what is on the Net. This suits the providers, who come from the world of telephones and cable TV, and are structured to make money by selling content and services to subscribers.
The other vision, and the one that has brought a billion people onto the Net and has stirred hope around the world, says the value of the Net comes from who is on the Net. The "who" isn't a solitary face; the "who" is us, together. The most exciting developments on the Internet have been about how we are connecting with one another, touching one another, and building ideas, services, and new social forms together...
...An Internet delivered by a tiny handful of old-technology providers, even if constrained by Net neutrality, doesn't get us to the second vision. It doesn't give us access laid like a blanket over the entire country, rich and poor alike. It doesn't give us a Net that we make together, rather than a Net the contents of which we consume.
For that, we need more than Net neutrality. We need a structural change.
We gave the incumbent providers their chance. They have failed. The FCC could decide to once again require them to act as wholesalers to local Internet Service Providers, which would offer genuine competition on price, access, reliability, services, and whatever other differentiators an open market would devise.
We have to have Net neutrality, but we should not settle for it.