What We Are Losing

America’s failure to deliver broadband — a failure that has become absolute due to the Bell-cable duopoly — also means the end of America’s capability to innovate.

This was made clear to me recently by Ronald Baron Yokubaitis, who has been fighting (unsuccessfully) on behalf of competition for a decade.

Innovation lost or gone abroad, is one of our talking points when we make
the rounds in Austin or Washington. Name one innovative new Internet
business started by a Bell or Cable Co.? Skype? Fon?  Correro.de? NIH (not
invented here).

The kids now growing up in Asia and the EU on 20-100Mbps,
and even some on Gig-E, WILL interact in this broadband frontier and create
the new applications that we Americans will be using, not NIH. While our
1-4 Mbps asymmetrical leftovers from IPTV’s 16-18 Mbps will look like

dial up in three years.

We need our wide open "Wild West" of open
Internet to get back in the game, rather than the "Back East" regime foisted
on us that we fled. Internet Application Providers are global and stateless
and might as well start acting that way. Which State (s) environment
provides the better platform to operate? U.S? Netherlands? Hong Kong? You
can’t ignore the US, but it is losing in importance. Innovation driven off
shore.

My context is the current rush of the Bells to get into the cable television
business on the one hand and the tiering of service on the broadband
infrastructure through charging extra for transport for any layer above IP
now termed "content".

This is why I have worked for the last 5 years
trying to get legislation passed regarding what is nw called Net Neutrality.
However, I think a better slogan is: "Net Neutrality through Customer

Choice".

This is not what we encounter in the EU where the
INTERNET is openly peered and circuit bandwidth is in many places,
Scandanavia and the Netherlands, much higher than in the US. WE see these
higher connection speeds attaching to our Usenet Newsgroups server clusters
located in Amsterdam. The edge of the Internet is in these higher
bandwidth countries, including, Korea, Japan, Hongkong and Singapore.

We
will be playing their NextGen games, not ours. They will have seen the
future well before us. They already see over the broadband horizon, while we
in the US wait and wait on broadband promises never fulfilled.