While existing blogs promote pro or con positions on net neutrality, they don’t show enough of why it matters, how we got here, and what effects the Internet may have on everything else. Net neutrality isn’t some obscure technical issue: it’s about nothing less than control of the flow of information in society. Since a society is its communications, it’s about control of the society itself. Will a few large companies be able to control what everyone knows, or will there be an informed and participating populace?
I’ve looked for a blog that collates all this and haven’t found one, so I’m starting this one.
Just so people know where I stand, here are my positions (at the moment; I’m all ears for arguments on all sides).
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Peerflow’s purpose is to promote innovation, creativity, and value
creation worldwide via free flow of information in a free market.
Why? In an interconnected world, closed societies don’t survive well: look at what happened to the Soviet Union, Easter Island, and Norse Greenland. Squelching information flow may look good to companies that currently hold valuable intellectual property, but it actually makes them less competitive: even Hollywood started off as a gang of pirates out-competing the Edison Trust. Holding a monopoly on information flow may look good in old-time local newspaper terms, but it just puts such monopolies behind the Internet curve while somebody else deploys the next killer app. Suppressing access to information that might reveal kickbacks may look good to politicians who crave power, but people get kind of mad when they eventually find out they’ve been had.
Societies can choose to interconnect and innovate, as Japan did after Admiral Perry came calling, as the U.S. has on a number of occasions, and as India seems to be doing now. Open communication promotes individual freedom, innovation, and wealth.
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Peerflow’s policy is
an open and neutral Internet with fast access for all participants.
Why? Nothing else provides nearly as much global reach and immediacy for individuals and groups. Look at what the Internet has managed to accomplish in a few short decades: electronic mail, IM, WWW, blogs, Yahoo!, google, BitTorrent, YouTube, distributed workplaces, online political campaigns. The long tail is online, and participation is how it’s done.
Meanwhile, traditional media are stuck in small scale interactions (telephone) or broadcasts (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, books) that favor a few big content creators over everybody else. And those few big media companies are increasingly consolidated and act in herds, with ill implications for innovation, economy, politics, and society.
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Public policy:
Government should either enforce net neutrality such as it was
in the U.S. before August 2006,
or not interfere with the creation of new players.
Plus stop promoting media consolidation.
And don’t mandate specific technologies.
Why? AT&T unbundling led to cell phones and the Internet. Relaxing European PTT prohibitions on modems let Europe catch up in the Internet. NTT unbundling led to 50MBps DSL and 100Mbps FTTH in Japan.
Compare to recent U.S. reconsolidation of the telephone and Internet industries: the U.S. is already about number 20 in Internet broadband speed and uptake, and continues to fall further behind.
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Private policy:
Promote competitive net neutral ISPs and services.
Why? We can’t depend on government to do it for us.
Government can’t afford to do it directly (it’s too big, except possibly for municipalities), and government oversight is too amenable to rigging by powerful corporate interests.
Who am I? Just an interested party, so I’ll draw as much as possible from what other people are doing, plus sprinklings of observations from 30 years of watching this stuff. Besides, these issues started taking up so much space on Perilocity that they need a home of their own: Peerflow.
-jsq