More than likely, Broadcast.com wouldn’t have been able to afford a quality “preferred distribution channel”, stream quality would have sucked, and Mr. Cuban would still be managing the local Bonanza.

Respectfully,
Jim Jones

I honestly don’t see what the big problem is with carriers charging for different Quality of Service(QoS) levels. If the carriers still had a monopoly on internet access then maybe regulation would be justifiable. But with reasonably good competition, there’s no need to enforce net neutrality.

http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/kintera_cuban_and_common_cause.html

Brian

I agree, let the market figure out what works best, keep the regulators out of it.

If the ISP are left to their own accord and someone wants to use Skype or Vonage for VOIP, I would bet all of Mark’s money that AT&T will make it a financially burden not to use AT&T’s VOIP solution if you use AT&T as your ISP. Unfortunately there is not a win-win scenario for this argument, at some level someone loses, because there will not be enough competition. More than likely it will be Skype or Vonage that lose because the public will save a few bucks per month to make their ISP rich by using their preferred services.

I am not against capitalism and my mortgage gets paid because my company profits from people buying our product. I just do not like the bigger, deeper pockets forcing their inferior products on the public by squeezing the little guy out. Because once that happens they can charge any price they want and the public eventually loses.

You bring up some good points about creating government oversight. The problem is that the government indirectly created the monopolies through regulation thus reducing competition. The various municipalities are addicted to the revenue generated from the fees that they charge the Telcos and cable companies. The fees along with the resources needed to comply with the insanely complex and immense regulation requirements increase the costs to those providers.

If, in a deregulated environment, the cable companies begin to overcharge their customers, then other technologies become relatively cheaper creating entrepreneurial opportunities and efficiencies reducing costs. Additionally smaller towns and areas that are passed over by the large corporations can be serviced by local companies. This has worked well in rural areas of my state and the costs that the local companies charge are comparable to the larger cities.

The market could easily support different service levels. Again if one company charged more than the market would bear, pricing pressures from competitors and technology improvements would bring the costs down. The Telecommunications act of 1994 (removing some, but not nearly enough of the regulations) dropped long distance rates to just a fraction of their previous levels, assuming you make your long distance calls out of state. Yet if you make the LD call within the same state, then it’s more expensive because the State government gets in the way causing higher costs, etc.

Going a step further (and I realize you are in no way advocating my next point) when the infrastructure becomes a full blown public works effort the government loses money and a lot of it. One example is the Ashland Fiber Network developed and paid for by the City of Ashland, Oregon. They are desperately trying to sell the network to a private company to recoup just some of the expense.

I’m afraid I may have gone off on a tangent from Mark’s original post. Going back on topic, imagine how these types of organizations (not just this one) that do everything but hit the send button would react if they suddenly had to pay more to send out massive numbers of emails. Now imagine how much more effective their campaign would be if the users who wish to send an email on this topic wrote it themselves and sent it from their personal account. Rather than setting up a filter like Mark had to do, he would have to sort though each and everyone 

Padraic

It would require a very high level of cooperation across all ISP’s along the chain. What if I pay for this service from my ISP, but the blogmaverick.com network doesn’t pay for access to the same nets? Kind of wastes my money, doesn’t it? I really just don’t know how such technical leaps can be taken without fundamentally screwing with the fundamental IP-routing fabric of the Internet.

It’d be great if it could happen, but we’re talking about at least a decade before it can all be well-designed and finally trickle down to all Internet users. Think about it: Cisco and other companies will have to come out with new routers and other equipment, at all levels of the network (from fiberoptic backbone to home WiFi). Operating systems programmers would have to rewrite their network stacks. IP devices such as phones, televisions and anything else would have to be upgraded.

If you’ve got a link or some explanation of how it can happen, or current plans to make it happen, I’d be happy to read it.