There's been a lot of buzz of late about what the big telecom mergers just approved by the FCC (Verizon-MCI and AT&T-SBC), combined with recent FCC rulings giving broadband providers a lot more monopoly powers, might do to the innovative and freewheeling nature of the Internet. The single best piece of analysis I've seen so far was by David Coursey, a columnist for eWeek.com. He starts with SBC CEO Ed Whitacre's comments on BusinessWeek's website, which poured fuel on the fire:
BW: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
Whitacre: "How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
Coursey then writes:
No, Mr. Whitacre, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Vonage, and the whole rest of the Internet isn't nuts, you are. Worse, you're the nut who is running our country's largest telecom provider.
Read the whole thing. If you've been scratching your head trying to understand what's at stake in these mergers, it's a great summary.
A "good analysis" would have taken the time to uncover the preferential-packets legislation that SBC had been counting counting on, the potential preferential-packets legislation in committee (which Doc Searls mentioned in a roundabout way the following week).
Clearly Whitacre was showing his hand a little too much: the "no one's paying for broadband" is obviously untrue. He might have better gotten away saying "more bandwidth usage is good for us" and dodged the question...
delicious
digg
technorati
Ridiculous!
Do you not think for a second that those "pipes" have been fully depreciated? There has been a return on their investment already, for many years.
This ridiculous comment is illustrative of the monopoly-mentality that we must be extremely careful to avoid...