Paul Kapustka strips the Network Neutrality issue down it its real core:
The RBOCs and cable will use all their firepower to try to keep video captive, to make money off it the way they did off voice.
Americans love TV. They even had to invent the TiVo to extract the 0.1% precious metal from the toxic sludge. Just as Lessig lamented his Grokster framing as being too abstract, maybe this neutrality issue is getting too academic. OK, you and I know it's really about applications not yet invented. The 2040 fridge DNA sensor that takes a quick peek at the week-old chicken, sequences the genomes on its surface and refers the whole lot back in real-time to biohazard central for an opinion, or whatever.
For now, it's all about TV. Will the goggle box become the Google box, or not?
Why not call a spade a manual trench digging utensil and point out that the "triple" play involves telcos selling captive video over duopoly lines, which is direct competition to alternative Internet-based suppliers whom they would like to cut out of the picture (pun intended). (Of course, "triple" play is itself an idea caught in legacy telco-think, in that there isn't a total unbundling of all the stages of consumption, and fragmentation into a zillion aggregators, filters, distributors, etc. enabled by the uber-flexible Stupid Network.)
Couch potatoes of the world unite! You've nothing to lose but your peanut-shaped remotes!
Full disclosure: I went cold-turkey on the medium in 1989, don't own a TV, so I don't know what I'm talking about.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:27 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/666