As part of AT&T's Astroturf plan to monopolize the Internet and blackmail all its users, it has had two of the Internet's "inventors," Dave Farber (right) and Michael Katz, produce an anti-net neutrality screed in The Washington Post.
In this column, Farber and Katz make the extraordinary claim that legislating fairness on the Internet would reduce innovation, as though monopolists were capable of such things.
Following is my response, which I tried to share with Farber's list:
I'm not at all surprised that some engineers like Kahn (and Farber) might oppose an anti-trust solution to the problems of the Bell monopoly.
They're not lawyers. By and large, they shun policy. They seek engineering solutions to problems, and can't imagine political or economic interference being anything more than a nuisance.
If the U.S. had a competitive
telecommunications market, as envisioned by the 1996 Telecommunications Act,
I'd agree with them 100%.
But we don't. The Bell System has been put back together. And this time, without the regulations or requirements of its first incarnation 100 years ago.
The right solution is to break up the Bell System again, or to at least separate the provision of bits from the selling of the service associated with those bits, as is done in Europe and everywhere else that copied our 1990s model of regulation.
Yes, network neutrality is just a slogan.
No, it's not an optimal solution.
Yes, we're playing on a field created by Ed Whitacre of AT&T, whose threat to blackmail successful sites, married to the success of this scheme in cellular (whose growth lags the rest of the world as a direct result) began the current controversy.
It's wrong to assume engineers like Mr. Kahn know or care about such things.
But someone must. Otherwise, the U.S. Internet economy will fall as far behind the rest of the world as our cellular economy already has.
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