aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, November 28, 2005

Network neutrality

Today The Philadelphia Inquirer has part 2 of Jeff Gelles’ Consumer Watch column on keeping cable from abusing its power:

[The Center for Creative Voices in Media director Jonathan] Rintels’ top priority is a rule called “network neutrality” that would bar any Internet provider from blocking or slowing down data streams from any source to give a competitive advantage to content in which it has a financial stake.

Neutrality is crucial to keep the Internet as free and open as we trust it is today. It’s also crucial if the cable-television business model - selling consumers a large bundle of content, most of it unwanted, at a high price - is ever to give way to an Internet model of unlimited choices for consumers.

Cable companies like Comcast don’t like this concept, for obvious reasons: If you can buy an individual TV show or movie from, say, “movies.com” and watch it on your TV same as you would a movie or TV show on traditional cable, the whole cable-TV business model is at risk.

In Rintels’ wish list, and mine, Congress and the FCC could simply require broadband providers to rent an open pipeline. Short of that, though, he has ideas about how smaller changes can nudge the marketplace in the right direction:

Net-neutrality rules that guarantee us access to content and applications - not just movies, but inexpensive phone service and other new Internet technologies - while barring broadband providers from discriminating in favor of affiliated sites.

Part 1 is here. Via Jonathan Rintels at the Center for Creative Voices in Media Blog.