[ale] OT: Craig Newmark of Craig's List on Net Neutrality

[Jim Philips]

On Sunday 11 June 2006 19:55, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> Jim Philips wrote:
> > On Sunday 11 June 2006 13:52, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> >> Geoffrey wrote:
> >>> It's like Joe's puts up an ad in the local paper
> >>> and Pizza Hut pays the newspaper to NOT print it.
> >>
> >> That already happens more than you may notice or care.  Billboards are a
> >> good example.  Do you really think that CocaCola needs a $1M billboard
> >> in Time Square?  No, but they will pay $1M every year to keep Pepsi from
> >> having that space.  Fox News did it to CNN at that CNN Center, signed a
> >> mulit-year lease on a billboard right outside CNN, then lambasted CNN on
> >> it.  Home Depot now buys up neighboring property when selecting a new
> >> site, specifically to keep Lowes from opening a store right next door.
> >> "Squeezing out Joe" has been a business tactic for as long as mankind
> >> has been doing business.
> >
> > Yes, and this is a particularly inapt simile. Billboards have never been
> > a medium the average Joe could use for communication.
>
> That is not true.  Billboards were the websites of the 60s,70s,80s, and
> 90s.  Billboard pricing is less than some people pay for Internet these
> days, let alone hosting a website professionally.  Views per billboard
> scale much higher, and are more targeted, than Hits per webpage.

Yes, I'm sure everybody on this mailing list can remember when billboards were 
as popular a medium of self-expression as the blog.  :p

> > Telephones have always
> > been that and the Internet became that. Telephones became that because of
> > the principle of universal service (a classic case of government
> > intervention for the benefit of majority over the benefit for the
> > minority).  The principle of universal service stated that users easily
> > reached would subsidize the costs of reaching users in more remote areas.
> > Along with this came the idea that the phone company was a common carrier
> > for all traffic and could not prioritize traffic on the common phone
> > lines. These principles should be extended to the Internet. The value of
> > a network rises with the number of people it reaches. I'll grant the
> > phone companies that delivering an 18 meg video is a different task from
> > delivering an all text e-mail like this one. But the phone companies have
> > the balance in this equation all wrong.
> >
> >
> > If the
> > only way large files get delivered is through an agreement between the
> > phone company and the large content providers
>
> Is that FUD?  Where do you see that this is the issue that broadband
> providers are concerned with?

Where do you NOT see it? This whole debate was tipped off when the CTO of 
BellSouth went before Congress arguing for his company's right to charge 
high-bandwidth providers an extra fee for the extra burden they place on his 
networks. He specifically mentioned providers like Yahoo and Google (but 
other big names were implied) and to offer those players a fast lane. Once 
that principle is established, do you really think it will stop with them? 
And if the pricing is set by what big companies are able to pay, then simple 
economics should tell you that smaller players will quickly be priced out. It 
isn't at all misplaced to think that this could bring an end to the era of 
freely downloadable Linux distros on the Net.