One of the issues I’ve raised in the past related to the net neutrality debate is the imposition of a proprietary service development and deployment model which had previously prevailed in the switched public telephone network. My description is a bit inside baseball, but I came across this paragraph from Paul Wooters in a posting to Politech which does a much better job of explaining the impact of proprietary solutions on Internet users:
Unfortunately, we the consumers would be best served with clean and well designed IETF protocols, instead of confidential proprietary non-interoperable hacks by companies that try and outsmart each other. We have already seen what the “portal and advertising” opportunities for instant messenger clients have done to us. We now have to use MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber and Yahoo clients to be able to talk to all our friends. Instead of one clean good working IM protocol.
Most of us can relate to what an absolute pain it is to have to deal with different IM clients. Your colleagues are on Yahoo, half of your friends are on AIM, another contingent are on Gmail and your former coworkers are on MSN… and so on… and so forth.
Another example I could provide is legal digital content, which pretty much always has DRM applied to it. You love your iPod, but you would prefer Naptster’s subscription model to paying for individual songs as on iTunes. Unfortunately Napster and iTunes don’t play together.
The prevailing business model consumers are up against at the moment relies on proprietary solutions that don’t cross-connect with one another. This results in smaller, less valuable networks for all of us. Add to that increased vertical integration of device and content and you see a model of decreasing utility for the customer. All of this is being done in the name of vendors seeking a larger piece of the pie. What content companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, telecommunications companies and the like are failing to see is that as they reduce the value of the end product consumers will grow increasingly disinterested and in the end buy less. Thus they fight for a larger piece of a shrinking pie, where open standards and networks create a much larger pie for everyone.
Tags: Net Neutrality
