The Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act
August 3, 2005 – 8:31 pmSo,
The paid shills politicians in Washington are being bribed lobbied to pass the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.
Of course, you should know that in the language of legislation, this bill is about everything but investment and consumer choice.
The whole point of the Internet, as opposed to older networks like the original AOL and CompuServe, is that every computer is equal. That is, the Internet is a dumb network designed to carry simple data packets from one machine to the next. It doesn’t care what those packets represent, as long as they conform to some basic standards.
This was the vision of the internet as the great democratization of communication. You don’t have to be the phone company or a large multinational corporation to have this amazing communication technology at your disposal.
You also didn’t need a lot of cash to have the same voice on the Internet as Shell Oil or the government.
As you can imagine, the status quo hate that. Oh sure, we’ve gone through the years of newspaper editors crying about the lack of editorial control, but that’s nothing compared to the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.
According to Susan Crawford, “The whole point of BICCA is that it dismantles any interconnection obligations for broadband providers. These obligations go upwards — so there’s no requirement to allow all applications or content to be permitted or carried on the network. And they also go downwards — so there’s no requirement to allow all user devices to be attached to the network.”
This is nothing less than the dismantling of the Internet. This is going back to the stone age of centrally controlled content from big stuffy media companies. Boring as fuck and just as profitable.
There’s a reason CompuServe, Prodigy, and the old AOL are no longer with us. Don’t bring back by legislative fiat that which to market has soundly rejected. You’ll just end up with Fidonet all over again…
