Cable v. Commons
August 13th, 2003
From Keeping the Net Neutral from Salon:
Imagine if you called 1-800-L.L.-Bean and your phone company said, ‘Sorry, we’re not going to connect your call because we have a deal with Land’s End.’” For telephone service, that would be preposterous; the phone company is prevented both by laws and by customer outrage from limiting your calls to specific phone numbers.
But Waldron says that on the broadband Internet, customers enjoy no such protections. If your cable company decides it wants to sign a deal with Land’s End and stop you from visiting L.L. Bean’s Web site, it’s free to do so — what are you going to do, find a new cable company?
Worth thinking about.
For more reading on this issue, check out the Larry Lessig interview in Scientific American, or Lessig’s book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.