The Trojan App

“It wasn’t so many years ago, remember, when AT&T (the old
AT&T, the U. S. national telephone monopoly) owned the phone
wire in your walls. You put the wire there, or your builder did,
and you certainly paid for it, but once dial tone filled the lines
those lines became the physical property of Ma Bell and you
couldn’t legally touch them. Everyone longing for the bad old days
should remember when you couldn’t touch your own phone lines under
penalty of law. Today or tomorrow, we’re told, the FCC will vote
under the guise of net neutrality to re-instill some of those old
ways of doing business, at least for wireless networks.

“Well it won’t work.

“The short story of what’s happening at the FCC is that the
agency is trying to grab power over the Internet and to make that
happen is paying-off any number of constituencies. With everything
eventually going onto the net as a data service, the FCC wants to
avoid irrelevancy, so this is how they are doing it with the help
of Google and Verizon. Net neutrality partisans appear willing to
accept more oversight if it comes with guarantees against packet
throttling. And phone companies are willing to accept broader
restrictions if they can still throttle or introduce tiered charges
on their only networks that matter anymore — wireless.”

Complete
Story