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June 20, 2006
How do you grow a “neutral” net?
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the net neutrality issue for some time. The whole thing seemed too easy. On the one side, plucky proponents of neutrality (the Good). On the other, greedy advocates of traffic discrimination (the Bad).
Over at the Weekly Standard, Andy Kessler has has identified the Ugly—and it is our stagnant market in information carriage.
Net society’s no longer satisfied with a high-penetration network; we want it to also get faster and faster, forever. Kessler points out that the only ones in a position to make that happen—the telcos and cablecos—lack incentive. It’s way more profitable for AT&T to just keep charging out the wazoo for international calls than to build out. And it’s more profitable for Comcast to charge you $100 every month for the same TV. Companies like these might (maybe) make infrastructure investments if there were a really big carrot before them, like the opportunity to extract rents from the big companies doing business online; if they’re prohibited from doing so by net neutrality rules, then there’s no carrot and the likelihood of real infrastructure investment goes to zero.
Talk about a Hobson’s choice. Either you give up on neutrality, and hope that in their graces, the telcos/cablecos decide to become aggressively pro-consumer (*cough*), or you embrace neutrality and resign yourself to a lifetime of watching “Lost” in 320×200 on your giant plasma.
Unfortunately, having done a great job identifying the problem, Kessler doesn’t do a great job identifying any solution. Carrots aren’t working, he says, so let’s try a stick. His proposal is to maybe threaten a government takeover of the entire infrastructure—that’ll put the fear into ’em, he thinks. Personally, I doubt that that would work. But Kessler’s thinking about the problem in the right way.
A better stick? I’ll take a shot: Aggressive public—federal, state, municipal, whatever—subsidy of mesh networking. Get these things out there using whatever moneys you can find, get them fast, and get them working. If they need access to the backbone, give it to them at public universities and other government-owned facilities. Whatever you do, give the telcos/cablecos no influence over the project—no connections to the backbone, no IP assignments, nothing. If you need space to put the repeaters, use eminent domain to get them up on the telephone poles for added “in your face”-ness. Encourage startups to come up with new (and, initially, low-bandwidth) uses for these things, probably with an initial emphasis on locally-oriented content. Then start looking for ways to get the bandwidth higher.
Once the telcos and cablecos start seeing a potential lunch-eater right in their own back yard, spurred forward with public money but not quite publicly-operated, they might get a reality check and really innovating on their networks even in an atmosphere of neutrality rules.
Remember those stories about how much AT&T hated packet-switching in the early days, and it was only because of DARPA and the public universities and a few key startups that anything happened to get AT&T off its butt and innovating? That’s where we are now. We’re not trying to move to publicly-owned information carriage, just private operation that’s got the right kind of incentives. It just takes a little bit of guts, in the right places. Where have you gone, J.C.R. Licklider?
Posted by Rob Courtney at June 20, 2006 02:00 PM
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