The following Internet Caucus State of the Net Conference panel debated Net Neutrality:
- Dr. Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America
- Link Hoewing, Verizon
- Bennett Ross, General Counsel, BellSouth
- Gerry Waldron, Covington & Burling (representing Internet content companies)
- Danny Weitzner, W3C
- Jonathan Krim, Washingtonpost.Com/Newsweek Interactive (moderator)
Click here to see the stream. Do it before you are charged extra for it.
But, seriously, it was a very interesting debate that mostly showed the two distinct sides of the hot debate. How hot? The Washington Post calls it the "most hotly lobbied telecom issue" and the "expected source of expected source for tens of millions of dollars in industry campaign contributions during this election cycle." Reuters has the basics of the current status of the fight here after a Senate hearing on the subject.
Our takeaways:
-Where are the cable companies? Are they just letting the telecoms carry the water for them or do they have a different perspective?
-As the Senate hearing showed, there's lots of confusion about what it meant by a "tiers" in Net Neutrality. Most media reports on "tiers" focus on the fact that the pipe owners will charge more for services that require higher bandwidth and thus might extract huge dollars from Google, Yahoo and eBay. Yet, many in Washington, are more focused on the whether the tiering problem is really about the small Web company that can't afford to pay what a billion dollar plus competitor can afford to compete. So far, there's been a dearth of small, VC-funded companies in this debate. And, it could be the death of them if they don't engage soon. They shouldn't expect the big Web firms to indefinitely fight their fight. Look for strange Net Neutrality bedfellows coming soon. (This could also mean telecoms and cable firms cutting sweet deals to Web 2.0 firms to stick it to Yahoo/Google/eBay/Vonage).
-The Bell South lawyer on the panel practically dismisses the fact that consumers would pay for 100 MB broadband to the home anytime soon. He asks "who's going to pay for it?" I don't know about you, but I just got my cable bill today and would much prefer to put my close to three figures of dollars toward thousands of interactive HD video and audio channels, rich online gaming, VOIP services, video conferencing, etc, etc, etc, than a Plain Old Cable Box.
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