Fergie's Tech Blog

The Slow Lingering Death of Net Neutrality?

Om Malik sounds the alarm:

On the front page of The Wall Street Journal [obnoxious registration required], the clock started to tick on the “network neutrality.”

Verizon Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg told reporters: “We have to make sure they don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity.”

Anyone who forgot the comments of AT&T’s Ed Whitacre and BellSouth’s CTO Bill Smith, this is just a reminder. The argument is that the phone companies are going to charge for better performance for say games, or movie downloads or software downloads. It is not a bad thought, though only in cases where latency is a big issue. The argument of better network performance, as many in the business would tell you, is a bit of chimera.

posted by Fergie @ 1/06/2006 07:21:00 AM