The [phone/TV (Television) cable] carriers are going to lobby for the laws and regulations they need, and they're going to do the deals they need to do. The new system will be theirs, not ours. The NEA principle [1]—Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it— so familiar to the Free Software [2] and Open Source [3] communities will prove to be a temporary ideal, a geek conceit. Code is not Law [4]. Culture is not Free [5]. From the Big Boys' perspective, code and culture are stuff nobody cares about.
That's us: Nobody.
The new carrier-based Net will work in the same asymmetrical few-to- many, top-down pyramidal way made familiar by TV, radio, newspapers, books, magazines and other Industrial Age media now being sucked into Information Age pipes. Movement still will go from producers to consumers, just like it always did. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Literally.
“Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes [6]”
Network Neutrality, that is, a network that just delivers the packets, stupid, with no cognizance of what app, device, or end-user generated them, is an public good that gives rise to much innovation, value creation and economic growth at the application layer. It is the single greatest factor in the success of the current Internet.
But a Network Neutrality rule, even a strong one, can fail.
“http://isen.com/blog/2005/12/what-network-neutrality-rule- wants.html [7]”
If you want to help save the net [8], bug your provider for IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) today.
If you want to **ensure** the Net remains a free place for ideas and services - you - yes you, dear reader, must also take action. Implement IPv6 at home, and at work. Get a ipv6 tunnel [9] and publish your AAAA records! Don't ask for permission. Just. Do. It.
“One escape from the silo - ipv6 [10]”
Each article is a definite must-read if you value the future of the Internet. I know that David Isenberg [11] has been saying this for a long time on isen.blog [12], but it seems to be coming to a head, what with the entrenched phone and cable companies wanting to carve out the Internet in their own (incompatible) images.
And IPv6 would prevent a lot of networking problems [13] and return us once again to a true “point-to-point” nature of the early (pre- commercial) Internet.
[1] http://www.worldofends.com/#BM_8
[4] http://www.code-is-law.org/
[6] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673
[7] http://isen.com/blog/2005/12/what-network-neutrality-rule-
[8] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673