Jim,
If you look beneath Goldberg's post in the comments section you come across some interesting entries and some not so surprising names of contributors:
Kudos to Canada in resisting NN -- debunking that everyone else ...
I was delighted to see Mark Goldberg's post alerting us in America that the Canadian Government is opposed to embracing net neutrality regulation as well. I love Mark's no apologies free market stance. He knows the Internet's growth, ...
posted by Scott Cleland @ 5:01 PM, February 09, 2007
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I agree with your contentions over the need for a fair playing field, but I question the number of types of playing field, as I'll explain momentarily.
I cannot overlook how obfuscated this situation has become due to several factors, though. First, the redefinition of incumbent telephone and cable tv monopolies into ISPs. The former comes from a world of common carriage, and the latter, Hollywood. Neither of them, beyond supporting simple transport, were progenerative in the development of the Internet, and they continue to fight off the end to end principles of the Internet to this day.
At a minimum there should be a law that says journalists must specify "ISPs with SMP" as such when referring to the telcos and MSOs, forbading them to be called simply "ISP."
Secondly, those ISPs possessing SMP have managed to incorporate in their repertoires, on top of their legitimate 'best effort' Internet access and whatever remnants of common carriage still remains, voice, video and data "services" that emanate from their cores, at the center of their labyrinthine architectures. Those "services" that they provide, which the public ostensibly so badly demands, compete with everyone else's best effort traffic flows that are comprised of "applications" residing at the edge (as opposed to the core). Should those services be banned? Certainly not. At the same time, however, they should not be confused with, or create confusion over, the definition of inter-networking, i.e., the Internet.
So the struggle to achieve a fair playing field is compounded by the existence of two different types of playing fields: edge-based (Internet) and core-based (content & other services-provisioning).
While these arguments may come across as largely mundane, by now, if not utterly cliché, they nonetheless remain fundamental to the problem.
FAC |
