Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the FCC to explain why Net Neutrality is so important. The following is a summary of what I’ll be sharing with the FCC.
First, some background: I’m an entrepreneur with a background in creating Internet businesses that span online entertainment, advertising and Web infrastructure. I remember when the Internet was controlled by a different regime–back when you couldn’t even connect to the Internet without adhering to NSFnet policies. Legends of Future Past, my first commercial Internet application, and perhaps the first commercial Internet online game, snuck-in anyway and didn’t get big enough to piss anyone off before the Internet became commercialized. Since then, I’ve created a Web software company that participated in building Web 1.0, and a gaming/advertising company.
All of the entrepreneurial blossoming we’ve experienced on the Internet over the last 15 years has been due to the Internet’s commercialization and unfettered access to content and applications. As others have observed, telecom companies had every opportunity to create a company like Google, but didn’t. It wasn’t because of lack of capital, or even lack of talent–telecom companies are certainly great at building huge networks. But they’ve consistently lacked the vision to create applications that anyone cares about. If you want a good comparison of what the Internet might be like if the telecom companies had made all the rules, look at the utter dearth of success with their proprietary mobile computing platforms or the how hard it is for entrepreneurs to deal with mobile carriers.
One of the arguments often used against the concept of Net Neutrality is that “regulation isn’t needed to keep the Internet open.” In fact, raising the specter of government interference is one of the primary arguments against Net Neutrality that is used by the telecom lobby. The wording of these statements is intended to strike fear into anyone with concerns about large government, government failures, etc. Yet it misses one big point: the Internet is actually one of the US government’s great success stories–if you are a US taxpayer, then you or your parents (or their parents) paid for the Internet back when it started as ARPANET. Large telecom companies have generated enormous wealth by capitalizing on this–let’s not begrudge them the money they’ve created by investing in the Internet, but let’s not surrender control of the ‘net either. We paid for it, so of course we get to have a say in the rules that govern what content gets to be created and who gets to access it.
Issues of equity aside, the practical issue remains: it is clear that telecom carriers are more interested than ever to own and control content. Add to this that US Internet carriers are getting less competitive and offer fewer services than many international locations. If we want to continue the innovation on the Internet that has led to widespread innovation such as Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, Google, World of Warcraft–then we need to hold US telecom carriers to Net Neutrality standards now. Let’s learn from the pain of mobile entrepreneurs who have had to beg for permission from telecom bureaucracies: a few government rules will benefit society, consumers and all businesses.
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