There’s been no small amount of handwringing over the WSJ’s (uncharacteristically poor) reporting about Google’s attempts to strike caching deals with major ISPs. Dave Isenberg explains how the WSJ blew it. Larry Lessig has a few things to say about it, too.
Amit
this is an issue I have internal battles with. Overall, I really really want Net-Neutrality (NN) but I don’t like regulation dictating how ISPs should operate. Ideally we would have enough ISPs where competition would exist and consumers could favor the ones with NN if that was important to them.
The edge caching is an interesting spin on NN and it makes a lot of sense to me but isn’t the net effect to the consumer that major sites such as Google and Amazon will have a better user experience than the mom-n-pop internet store?
Maybe in the end, consumers want better performance from the sites they visit most often and NN is a regulatory scheme that will have all sorts of loopholes.
MB
Ideally, we’d have a world in which prisons weren’t required. But we live in this one, with lots of bad actors. So too do we live in a world without perfect markets (and always will).
The problem isn’t with being able to pay for quicker access (don’t we already do that? I pay extra for a 10/2 connection). Rather, it’s an issue of exclusivity. *That’s* what I’m concerned about.
(There’s much more to NN than this, of course, but I’d pick the exclusivity battle first.)
Amit
what would you do if Google perhaps with a few other partners (i.e. Amazon, CNN) created their own ISP that was freely available but had exclusivity? in one sense some folks who can’t afford any internet could get it but on the other we have to deal with the ramification of the new ISP’s exclusivity.
MB
Well, that’s pretty much the AOL of old, no? Let people go suffer that.
Also, a proposal to do exactly that was just (temporarily) shelved at the FCC. The idea was to auction off a slice of spectrum to an operator who promised,in return, free nationwide wireless access. But this would be crippled access, filtered for all sorts of things that Focus on the Family and various FCC staff members don’t want The Children! to see.
From a policy perspective, though, I would start worrying if it looked like that new fakeinternet started squeezing out the original (unfiltered) net. There is a significant public value in the open access to information that the open internet provides. Democracy doesn’t mean a thing if the populace isn’t educated.