Bonfire of the Monopolists

In most places around the country, consumers are limited to zero, one or two choices for broadband connections to the Internet. I, for example, live in a metro area and have two choices: DSL from the phone company and cable from -- er -- my cable provider. My neighbors to the north have exactly one choice for broadband: DSL.

And with the mergers among the carriers, we're down to two telephone companies and a handful of cable operators. Which doesn't leave anyone interested in competition with a warm and fuzzy feeling.

The Carriers: Dedicated to Reducing Choice

The market for last-mile services might have been more competitive had the carriers not spent significant time and capital fighting municipal wi-fi or, for that matter, spending more on lobbyists than on application R&D.

In point of fact, the telcos have spent most of their energy attempting to reduce choice for last-mile services, even down to battling the city of New Orleans over its deployment of WiFi during the Katrina reconstruction.

We must also ask ourselves why the carriers spend so much on lobbyists and lawyers rather than value-creating applications like Skype, YouTube, and Vonage? The answer is that the carriers believe they can magically legislate value-creation by exterminating net neutrality and erecting tollbooths all over the Internet. And, of course, they are wrong.

Meanwhile, Cisco and other networking vendors are hawking hardware to the carriers that is utterly ominous in nature. It appears designed to analyze, block, filter, meter, and otherwise meddle with Internet traffic to financially benefit the carriers. In fact, they almost come right out and giggle over the capability of degrading applications that are competitive to the carriers' offerings.

Democracy versus Communism

And, yet, somehow the "let the free market decide" crew over at Townhall believes that this is a Democrat vs. Republican issue. Someone has convinced a few of these folks that letting the carriers destroy the current state of neutrality is a good thing.

Despite the attempts to portray it as such, this is not a Democrat vs. GOP issue. It is a Democracy versus Communism issue. Do we want the continued invention of thousands of new, diverse applications like Skype, Google, and Vonage? Or do we want a centralized planning committee at the carriers' headquarters to decide which startups live or die?

Plenty of conservatives -- from the Gun Owners of America, to Right Wing News, Instapundit, etc. -- support net neutrality. And more are joining the cause every day.

It's easy to see why. When net neutrality was violated in Canada recently, the results weren’t pretty. In that case, a telco blocked access to a political website whose views ran counter to its opinions. Consider that for just a moment.

Furthermore, such an environment destroys innovation. Even today, with a political landscape that seems to favor the carriers' stance, innovation has stalled. Stifel Nicolaus, an analyst quoted in Business Week, stated, "Right now, I would never invest in a business model that depended on protection from Net neutrality."

So who will fund the next great Internet idea? The answer is: no one. The result of killing off neutrality will be more censorship, less innovation, and will place America's Internet leadership position at risk.

The fathers of the Internet say...

The current state of the Internet -- the one that has resulted in such immense value creation -- is network neutrality. What the telcos are supporting is the extermination of neutrality and neutering the FCC's ability to enforce it.

Bob Kahn (co-inventor of TCP/IP), Vint Cerf (Godfather of the Internet), and Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the web) all favor network neutrality. But I suppose the telco lobbyists know more about the network then they do.

America's leadership in Internet innovation (and, by extension, its national security) hangs in the balance. Go to SaveTheInternet.com today and take action.

50-Year Mortgage Debuts in California

Have your eye on a nice new pad in Brentwood? It may yet be affordable, if you qualify for a new mortgage product: a 50-year note. Make the first payment and then think to yourself:

"Only 599 more payments - and this baby is all mine!"

Six dollars a gallon

Happy with gas prices now? Perhaps you should be:

...Imagine another terrorist attack — especially one on Saudi Arabian oil refineries, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said Monday during a visit to Pittsburgh. If terrorists took out the sulfur-cleaning towers in northeastern Saudi Arabia, as described in the beginning of Robert Baer’s book, “Sleeping With the Devil,” crude oil prices could easily top $150 a barrel and stay there for more than a year, Woolsey said. A barrel of oil sold for about $73 yesterday, with gas prices in the United States hovering around $3 a gallon. Most Americans don’t want to think about paying double that.

And exactly how did we get in this situation?

Both parties have contributed to excessive fuel usage by failing to raise minimum fuel-efficiency standards and promoting gas-guzzling SUVs.

But it is the Democrats who have blocked the construction of new refineries for decades. As recently as yesterday, they decried legislation to speed refinery construction as "weakening environmental protections and [creating] new layers of bureaucracy."

It is the Democrats who have blocked offshore drilling for oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico and in the outer continental shelf.

It is the Democrats who have blocked ANWR for over a decade (if Bill Clinton had permitted it then, oil would be flowing today). If all of ANWR were a football field, the drilling area represents less than the size of a postage stamp.

It is the Democrats who have blocked development of peaceful nuclear energy, despite new and safe ways to build reactors and treat waste.

It is the Democrats who have blocked even the construction of windmills!

No refineries? No offshore drilling? No ANWR? No nuclear energy? No windmills?

It is the Democrats' history of obstructionism that is responsible for our current energy prices.

Remember that the next time the Mediacrats howl about high gas prices, oil company profits, and the administration. Their obstructionism is the real cause, as clear as day.

Financial sector awakens to net neutrality issues

When the Harvard Business School writes its next case-study of public relations campaigns gone awry, they would do well to use the lesson of the carriers and network neutrality. For never has so much capital -- in this case, many tens of millions of dollars -- been utterly wasted through a series of outrageous PR gaffes.

• Ed Whitacre, erstwhile Godfather CEO of SBC/AT&T, excretes a series of threats at value-creating application providers like Google and Vonage


• Williams Smith, CTO of Bellsouth/AT&T, blathers about similar brain-damaged schemes: charging Yahoo to load faster than Google, for example. And never mind about an innovative startup with a radical new search scheme - they'll now never even get kick-started with venture money.


• The leadership at Internet2 -- the high-speed, next-generation network backbone -- publicly worries about content-providers dealing with varying standards

Now the financial services industry -- a sleeping giant with lobbying power to spare -- has been aroused:

The U.S. financial sector, a powerful force in Washington, may be gearing up to jump into a Capitol Hill fight over the future of the Internet and stop an effort it says could add billions in costs just to maintain current offerings... ...they may wait for legislation to get to conference, where House and Senate negotiators work out differences between their bills. In that environment of closed-door bargaining, banks and credit unions may be able to secure the Net neutrality language they seek, industry lobbyists say. The National Association of Federal Credit Unions, America's Community Bankers, American Bankers Association and Independent Community Bankers of America, among other financial lobbyists, say they are monitoring the issue.

Bottom line: every business is at risk.

If you care about the future of the Internet, surf over to SaveTheInternet.com and take action. Today.

Net neutrality missing from Senate's telecom bill

The egregious Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) -- architect of the $200+ million bridge to nowhere -- released the long-awaited update to current telecomm law with a paean to the telcos. Missing, as expected, was any mention of network neutrality. Many in Congress -- GOP as well as certain key Democrats -- are as addicted to telco money as the typical teen is to MTV.

What the telcos and cable companies have spent tens of millions of dollars on (the best Congress money can buy?) is to change from the current state of FCC-enforced neutrality to no neutrality. In the proposed law, the FCC has no right to discipline the carriers for favoring content-providers.

Many commentators speculate that this omission will result in an Internet with three tiers of service:

1) Those content-providers (e.g., Google) that won't pay extra tarriffs and will run slow or, perhaps, not at all.
2) Content-providers (e.g., Yahoo) who decide to pay the packet-protection money and run with some quality-of-service (QoS) guaranteed.
3) New applications created by the carriers ("AT&T's SuperSearch!") that compete with content providers, with will run even faster.

In fact, Cisco's marketing lit for their new carrier hardware almost comes right out and guffaws over metering, filtering, degrading and/or blocking competitive network traffic.

Ever wonder why the telcos seem to spend more on lobbyists than inventing cool applications like Vonage and Skype? Now you know.

BusinessWeek said it perfectly last week: “…Blair Levin, analyst with Stifel Nicolaus: “Right now, I would never invest in a business model that depended on protection from Net neutrality…”

So the effect of the carriers’ activities is clear: it is already stifling Internet investment.

Get over to Save The Internet now... and do your part.

Judiciary Committee begins work on network neutrality

The House Judiciary Committee has opened a new front on the battle for network neutrality:

Two House Democrats are drafting a bill designed to impose antitrust penalties on broadband-access providers that attempt to demand fees from Web-content providers in exchange for priority treatment of their search, shopping and information-retrieval services. The legislation, still in draft form, is being developed by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), members of the Judiciary Committee.

And Russell Shaw, blogging at ZDnet, describes the cost of decimating network neutrality in human terms. Immerse yourself in the hot-tub of wisdom - and read the whole thing.

Google introduces Arabic to English translation tool

It's in beta, of course. I can't help but think of the ramifications for those responsible for our national security. Google Translate - Arabic-to-English Beta.