Hollywood studios have mostly stayed out of the net neutrality fight, but Tinseltown’s hometown paper, the LA Times, has this prominent piece today on the whole net neutrality debate. Penned by James Granelli, the article clearly favors the net neutrality proponents.
“The Internet has to be open,” said CinemaNow President Bruce Eisen. “Any user can go to any site now, and people have come to expect that. If the telcos charge the sites, that cost will ultimately fall on the consumer. And the consumer has other choices for Internet service.”
It’s not really a question anymore about broadband providers flexing their muscles to block applications. The question has slipped into the murky territory of “tiered” service; but proponents don’t even like that.
Internet phone service pioneer Jeff Pulver, however, said that such a tiered system — one for content providers willing to pay for a super-highway to the home, the other for those who stay on increasingly crowded freeways — could effectively relegate basic broadband to the backwaters and end up blocking the chances of success for tomorrow’s Googles and Amazons. By Pulver’s reasoning, the broadband providers would, in effect, be picking winners and losers among the creators of videos and other content and among search engines and aggregators that collect and sell that content to consumers. “It’s not like we’re free riders,” said Pulver, who co-founded Vonage and whose Pulver.com oversees more than a dozen Internet companies involved in radio, video and phone service. “We’re actually paying somebody for Internet access too.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:39 AM|Comments(1)
What Pulver fails to recognize is that no one is talking about blocking content or access. By his reasoning users of dial-up when broadband came around would no longer have been getting a fair deal. It just doesn't reason out.
Posted by: pkp646 at April 19, 2006 11:07 AM
Blogs We Read
