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!
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
