Broadband power to the people
It still amazes me how few consumers understand this and actually take the side of the cable company as though public utility franchises just don't exist anymore -- which, given the FCC's sorry regulation of telecom, is pretty much the case.
The government needs to make certain AOL-Time Warner will make bandwidth available equitably and at a fair price to all companies entering the broadband business. The best way to accomplish this is something that's such a good idea the FCC banished the concept years ago in the name of wondrous deregulation. I'm talking about the common carrier -- separating the roles of the provider of communications services from that of providing communications content.
Here's the issue: If nothing is done to assure fair access, your bandwidth provider -- typically a cable company -- will get to decide who you connect to and at what speed. Is that a choice you want AOL or AT&T to make for you? Or would you rather connect to what you want to see at the highest speed possible?
In my ideal world, there would be a pretty hard break between companies that owned cable systems and companies that provided the programming. TCI would not have been able to invest in all those channels they then force-fed their subscribers. That's bad for competition.
In Davidlandia, you could be in one business or the other but not both. In this case, the merged AOL-Time Warner would have to sell off its cable plant -- all that coax and transmission gear -- or get out of the programming business. Customers would then pay separately for content and the connection that brings it into their homes.
How far this should be taken is a fair question. Should AOL and Microsoft be forced to sell off their dial-up ISP businesses? No, since the telephone company sells service to all ISPs. On the other hand, ISPs shouldn't be allowed to discriminate about whom their customers connect to or at what speed. If an ISP offers its own boardband services, then it should be required to offer equal access (in terms of speed and the availability of connections) to other broadband services.
Much has been written here on ZDNet about government's role in maintaining competitive markets. Most commentators -- John Dodge, especially -- seem pretty unimpressed.
The reason for this is inactivity on the government's part. A failure of will rather than law. If the government were more active on a daily basis, pushing here, prodding there, we could avoid debacles like the Microsoft case.
If the government had acted while there were still Microsoft competitors around -- say five or six years ago -- the case might really have mattered. Today, technology is more likely to do Microsoft in than the government is, especially if Shrub takes the White House next January.
In pressing AOL-Time Warner to do what the company says it's committed to doing anyway (could we have a consent decree to that effect, Mr. Case?), the feds are taking baby steps now to avoid a big war later. And I am happy to see real-time law enforcement in action.
P.S. In my recent column about those awful :Cue:Cat devices, I mistakenly credited Xerox PARC for invention of the mouse. I was wrong; it happened down the road a piece at SRI.
Industry analyst David Coursey is vice president of news for PennNET Inc., a Silicon Valley B2B startup. He responds to readers on his site at www.coursey.com.