{"id":192,"date":"2006-02-02T12:30:51","date_gmt":"2006-02-02T17:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2006\/02\/02\/telecoms-and-the-toll-road-gambit\/"},"modified":"2006-02-02T12:30:51","modified_gmt":"2006-02-02T17:30:51","slug":"telecoms-and-the-toll-road-gambit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/02\/02\/telecoms-and-the-toll-road-gambit\/","title":{"rendered":"Telecoms and the toll-road gambit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t sure whether to write anything about the “network neutrality” issue, in part because my friend Rob Hyndman<\/a> has done such a good job of covering the subject – particularly an overview of the current state of affairs in his latest post<\/a> – but as usual I couldn’t resist \ud83d\ude42 Verizon has reportedly filed documents with the Federal Communications Commission that say it plans to use as much as 80 per cent of its network<\/a> for its own purposes. Everything else would get shoe-horned into the remainder (although Cynthia at IPDemocracy says it might not be as bad as it sounds<\/a>, and it looks like Om Malik agrees<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This, of course, is just the latest step in a campaign by the major telcos to strong-arm<\/strike> convince Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo to pay extra for delivery of their broadband content to consumers, a campaign that got its start with comments from Ed<\/a> “pay up for those pipes” Whitacre of AT&T (formerly SBC) and Bill Smith of BellSouth. Why should they have to carry all that content on their networks, the telcos complain – why should Google make money from broadband and not share some of it with the carriers whose pipes they use?<\/p>\n

As Mike at Techdirt notes, part of the problem is that the phone companies haven’t spent the money necessary<\/a> to do all the things they want to do on their networks. The telcos made all kinds of promises about upgrades they planned to make – in return for which they got various concessions from the U.S. government – and then they never followed through, as telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick writes<\/a> in a new book called The $200-Billion Broadband Scandal<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n

The big question is: Will the U.S. government allow the telcos to get away with this move, or will they step in to enforce some form of network neutrality? There used to be a concept called the “common carrier” principle<\/a>, in which telcos were required to carry any and all voice traffic — that idea seems to have gone out the window.<\/p>\n

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I wasn’t sure whether to write anything about the “network neutrality” issue, in part because my friend Rob Hyndman has done such a good job of covering the subject – particularly an overview of the current state of affairs in his latest post – but as usual I couldn’t resist \ud83d\ude42 Verizon has reportedly filed … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Telecoms and the toll-road gambit”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}