AT&T’s and Verizon have been arguing that they should be allowed to charge differential rates for differential network performance. This is the most cogent refutation of their arguments I’ve read thus far, and a clever reframing of the debate:

Nothing stops AT&T and Verizon proceeding with their non-neutral networks.They just can’t label their offers Internet access. We call non-neutralnetworks - private networks. There already exists a market for privateconnectivity serving needs not addressed by the public Internet. AT&T andVerizon can pitch their various ideas about quality of service to theproviders of commercial Internet content like Google as well as theirrespective end user customers. AT&T and Verizon already have a portfolio ofprivate network offers only the attempt to frame them as some sort of”enhanced” Internet access is new.

Here’s the whole piece.

Related Posts:

• Text Beats Voice (October, 2005)
• “The Internet? Bah!” (April, 2008)
• Virgin Acquires Helio (June, 2008)
• Iteration of the Prime Intellect (November, 2005)
• Getting Address Book Contacts to Helio (May, 2007)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 7:24 pm and is filed under economics, society, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.