Monday, June 19, 2006

Telco shill gets decimated in Net Neutrality debate

Mike McCurry, former Clinton Press Secretary, is currently the mouthpiece for the telecommunications lobby trying to force a broken internet through Congress. He recently had a debate with Paul Misener, Vice President for Global Public Policy at Amazon at George Washington University in DC.

Both of the men had time to give a presentation about their respective group’s stance on Net Neutrality, but the real fireworks started during the Q&A. You can watch the entire debate at Politics.tv, but Save The Internet has a great summary.

Some choice quotes (via Save The Internet):

Misener:
Tiered pricing for access is something we support. Amazon pays a lot more than ‘Joe’s-Internet-retail.com’ simply because we use more capacity… That makes perfect sense to us. You pay for that capacity. But the important component here is that once the consumer has paid for his or her capacity at their home they ought to be able to use that capacity however they want. There’s a fundamental misconception here that somehow delivery of video over the Internet is just like it is over cable TV, over satellite, over broadcast or, frankly, like delivery of content through newspapers or magazines. Those models have always been about ‘push.’ Somebody decides — who either owns the pipe or owns the newspaper — what content goes in their and pushes it out to consumers and they can choose to read it or not.


Misener is absolutely right and that’s what scares the telcos. They want a walled garden AOL/cable tv model where they can charge millions of dollars for preferred or guaranteed access. That is a broken internet.

Misener also discusses the standard telco talking point about prioritizing not discriminating:

When we get to the point of discrimination, there’s also this misnomer when we talk about things like wanting to prioritize videos so things don’t get clogged… We don’t want that either. We don’t think that that’s wrong for the network operators to be able to prioritize certain types of content. So if they want to prioritize telemedicine over data files that makes perfect sense. Let them do it. We’re not opposed to that. The [Net Neutrality] rules that we propose would not do that. Our concern is discriminating among the source or ownership of that content. So if the network operators are put in a position of favoring the Mayo Clinic over Johns Hopkins, that’s a problem. That’s the discrimination. That’s when the network operators become the HMO.


But that’s not what the telcos want. They don’t want to be able to discriminate based on IP protocol, they want to discriminate based on where the request is going. Bell South’s CTO flat out admitted that he wants to extort companies large and small:
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering.


This is fundamentally a fight over a working internet where packets are packets, the way it was designed.

Watch the entire thing for yourself.

http://www.politicstv.com/blog/?p=261

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