Internet, Broadband, and Regulation

Lawrence Lessig has a post about net-neutrality. I am a lot more concerned about this than DRM, which I think will work itself out usually in the best interest of small independent content producers. This is a lot more troubling though, and something I don’t know if I trust our lawmakers to handle correctly. We have really bad broadband in this country and I would very much like to see that get better. Even with such poor penetration we are still innovating more then most countries on the web, but I am not sure that will last forever when we don’t have the infrastructure to support it.

The telco companies like SBC etc have held us down too long, we need an open market for internet service providers, preferably from companies that are neither telephone or media previously. The net neutrality initiative has some big backers, so there is some hope, it’s not one of those hope-free populist movements. It’s more like new companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo etc) against the old dinosaurs .