From Tim Berners-Lee, in Edinburgh:
"Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."
This is a vital piece of the net neutrality debate. Everyone who has tried to take "their" piece of the Internet and control access to it has lost, big-time.
Newspapers have lost. Proprietary services hiding behind registration or paid firewalls have lost. The only way for them to remain minimally credible has been to push some of that content in front of the firewall, as the Wall Street Journal has done. But even there, the reach and bite of the Journal’s vaunted editorial page is reduced, greatly reduced.
This is something that the phone companies and cable operators are going to learn, something those who seek to write net neutrality into law are attempting to teach them. One would think they would be learning that lesson already, given the underperformance of their cellular data operations. But it turns out that the public’s appetite for chatting-with-friends-while-driving is virtually limitless, which covers up the failure.
Verizon Wireless honestly believes that having half of 10x is more
important than having 6% of 100x. Somehow they think that having a
bigger part of a smaller pie is meaningful.
The only reason this appears to be the case is because there are so few alternatives.
Eventually the phone companies will be forced to discover this as well.
It will take time for truly-neutral networks — muncipal, wireless,
Google – to to come on-stream. But once they are there, and consumers
see the difference between The Real Internet and the phony IMS variety
the phone and cable opolists are pushing, the older companies will be
well and truly dead.
The Internet, in other words, must remain under the control of the
edge. And it will. So long as users like you demand that it remain
there.
