by alec on November 15, 2005
It’s an important day at iotum. In fact, on a scale of importance from 1 to 10, today is an 11. Today, we turned our trial system on, and we’re ready to accept applications from beta testers. At this point we’re looking for folks physically located in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and the surrounding areas. That means area codes in 613, 514, 519, 905, and 416 primarily. If you’re interested, please pop over to the Simply Relevant blog, have a look at the criteria, and send us an application.
And to the iotum development team: congratulations!
by alec on November 15, 2005
You may recall Martin Geddes announcement of a new addition to the Geddes family. Well, I guess she’s sleeping through the night now, because Martin is back to his old, skeptical, contrarian self. Check out Martin’s broadside against Net Neutrality. He opines:
Net Neutrality is a dead end, because as Searls and Weinberger correctly noted, the Net isn’t a thing, it’s an interconnected set of agreements. These are bilateral and freely entered into. And since those agreements weren’t modelled off a viral template such as the GNU General Public License, they are all unique. There’s no contageous clause that insists the Internet becomes a “thing” by virtue of everyone having to agree to freely and neutrally pass packets in an ever growing pool of Neutraldom. So to impose neutrality you’re going to have to interpose yourself into a lot of contracts.
And finishes with:
Everything’s bass-ackwards. Neutrality is a sign of healthy supply competition and sophisticated ways of demand expression. It’s an output, not an input. Beware demanding net nuetrality as a blanket principle, rather than a scalpel to excise particular local anti-competitive acts. Kruschev decalred the corn harvest was great, too — but it didn’t create the incentives for more corn to be sown and for the system to succeed on future iterations. And net neutrality rules are likely to have the exact opposite effect of that intended too.
Net neutrality messes up freedom of contract, freedom of association, and property rights.
I don’t buy it.
Net neutrality as a communist plot? Ouch!
