NET NEUTRALITY….REED HUNDT SPEAKS!….Hmmm. Reed Hundt finally responds to my plea for his opinion about net neutrality. Or does he?
Imagine driving down your free public street…and all of a sudden a hoard of trucks carrying trash pours on to the road from every cross street….You are resentful of the government that passed no rule against “too many trucks” and you are mad at the trash-creators who filled the trucks, yet you have no choice. It is, after all, a neutral network, that free public street.
And so with [bandwidth hogging] video sent downstream from a movie studio over the American Internet’s shared access network….The aspiring blogger, collaborating user, nascent political association that would use the Web to create, click, converse, and do commerce ought to rail against the hapless FCC which should have written rules making the video distributors pay for their own connections, or otherwise keep their smelly trucks stuffed with trashy films off the information highway (as twas once called), so as to keep the average users speed up. In short we need a Non Neutral Network!
Or do we?
I think this is a colorful way of saying, “it’s complicated” ? at least given the current nature of the Internet in America. However, Reed does reiterate his call for a massive public investment in high speed internet to the home, which he believes would make the whole question moot. In the meantime, though, opinions continue to differ.
