CLICKHERDER

There’s buzz over at Slashdot about Sunday’s Washington Post article The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet. The Telcos want to charge extra to content providers for carrying their content over a premium carrier. Yahoo! may be faster than Google! eBay may be faster than Amazon! Horrors! The Post quotes AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr:

[Whitacre] complained that Internet content providers were getting a free ride: “They don’t have any fiber out there. They don’t have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free — and that’s bull,” he said. “For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!”

There is, on Slashdot, a lot of socialist-flavored corporate vs. consumer saber rattling going on. But the fact is that on the internet we’re all consumers, and the really cool thing is how many of us actually are corporate. And of course the real concern should not be for Google or Yahoo! but, as Alan Davidson (Google’s Washington policy counsel) said, for “bright young start-up with the next big innovative idea” who may be priced out of his start-up’s goals due to higher access costs or slower connectivity to his clientele.

It’s true that network neutrality has been a cornerstone of the Internet’s commercial success. But asking Congress to weigh in is, frankly, a much worse prospect. Remember that the Telcos have competition. The fact that they dragged their feet, clinging to their virtual monopoly on consumer internet access through most of the 90’s opened the door for the rise of cable internet. If the content providers fought back by offering discounts to customers who don’t use the telcos, consumers would have yet another incentive to move away from the telcos. Perhaps other ISP initiatives could find just the opening they need to bring other alternatives to the consumer such as affordable wide-area ether networks or wireless clouds.

The point is that although Whitacre and others’ desire to change the way access is monetized may seem like a threat to our very way of life, we ought to continue to trust the open market which created the Internet as we know it in the first place. The beautiful thing about free markets is that if left alone, they tend to correct themselves.

Filed by Joel at 12:18 pm under Web Development, Web Marketing