Jeff Pulver's recent post regarding SBC and Bellsouth should be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the Internet. That's Internet with a capital "I" as in, the one unified Internet, not a world in which many fragmented vendor controled internets balkanize our experience, slow innovation, reduce competitiveness, and undermine our basic freedoms -- as the monopolistic broadband vendors wish...
Jeff writes:
...the new battlelines are emerging in the communications war. The battle -- once waged between ILECs and CLECs, between cable and LEC, between wireline and wireless, between terrestrial and satellite -- has officially morphed into a battle between Internet Access Provider and Internet Application Provider.
The Jeff Pulver Blog: The Second Glove Is Thrown Down - Let the Communication Wars Begin:Read the rest. IP Inferno previously posted on this topic, when Ed Whitacre made his ridiculous comments to Businessweek...
BusinessWeek: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG), MSN, Vonage, and others?
Whitacre: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
IP Inferno: Ed Whitacre Wants The End of The InternetRight after I visited WiMAX Forum in October, I wrote my January column for VoIP Magazine. I focused on a technology called IMS which I predicted that the incumbent Telcos would use to block competitors and control consumer access to Internet Application Providers. I didn't think these predictions would come true so soon...
Call your congressman. Get the EFF on the case. If at all possible, leave SBC and Belsouth and get your broadband from some other source so that competition can be promoted. I recently moved to Sonic.net here in the bay area. While they still have to pay SBC for access, at least SBC gets less of my money... Don't sit idly by and let the monopoly broadband providers further destroy American competitiveness by stifling creativity, innovation, and liberty.
