Beware the privateers! They whisper sweetly of fantastic new services they will provide – a faster Internet, better quality, even medical alerts for consumers….and blah-de-blah. Their unspoken agenda, however, is to convert the open Internet commons into a pay-for-performance marketplace. The companies who control the “pipes” of the Internet – i.e., the telephone and cable TV companies – are starting to make their move.
It’s imperative that we pay close attention to these plans – and register our objections to Congress and the companies themselves.
At a briefing for reporters and industry analysts yesterday, the chief technology officer of BellSouth Corp. testified that Internet service providers should be able to sell higher-quality or priority services to certain websites. We knew this battle would soon arrive, but now we can see the puffs of smoke coming from their cannons. (See Jonathan Krim’s story in the Washington Post.)
William L. Smith told a House subcommittee that BellSouth should be able to charge companies for loading their websites faster than others, or for assuring that a voice-over-Internet service has higher quality sound. If network traffic got heavy, BellSouth should be able to sell guaranteed quality of service for favored types of “data packets” – say, streaming TV – while everyone else could suffer delays or degradation in transmission.
Smith tried to make all of this sound eminently reasonable. As he put it, "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket. In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground.”
But if we follow the logic of market-segmentation and price discrimination, it ends up converting this most precious open commons, the Internet, into an inequitable marketplace, with everything that that implies. It degrades the most fundamental virtue of the Internet – open access on an equal basis – and installs a top-down, seller-dominated system.
Sound familiar? Of course: It’s cable TV. It’s Prodigy and CompuServe. It’s the pop music biz. We’ve been there before, and everyone knows that it sucks.
If BellSouth were to be able to charge Google for priority speed in transmitting its search engine results, for example, then - poof! – only the Big Guys would be able to compete at the highest levels. Any newcomer with a great idea suddenly would suddenly face a huge, insuperable disadvantage. So much for the entrepreneurial revolution made possible by the Internet commons.
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