Word: aol
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This trend worries many. AOL fought restrictions when AT&T (after buying a gaggle of cable monopolies) proposed them. But now AOL, by buying Time Warner, is buying its own cable monopolies. And many are worried that AOL will forget its roots. Will the temptation to build its broadband network to protect itself against unallied content and new innovation be too great? Will AOL, like every other large-scale network that has controlled content and conduit, pick a closed rather than an open architecture? Will AOL become what it eats...
...costs of innovation. If to deploy a new technology or the next killer application--like the World Wide Web was in the early 1990s or gadgets to link the home to the Net may someday become--you first have to negotiate with every cable interest or with every AOL, then fewer innovations will be made. The Internet will calcify to support present-day uses--which is great for the monopolies of today but terrible for the future that the Internet could...
...Microsoft case was about the platform of the 1990s--Windows. The risk that AOL presents is to the platform of the 21st century--the Internet. In both cases, the question is whether a strategic actor can chill innovation. With the Internet, that answer depends upon the principles built into...
...AOL promises it will behave. It has been a strong defender of "open access" in the past. But its promises are not binding, its slowness in allowing other instant-messaging services onto its platform is troubling, and last month's squabble over access to ABC on Time Warner's network is positively chilling. These are not signs that the principle that built the Internet thrives...
...test will be whether AOL sticks to the principle of e2e, and if it doesn't, whether the government will understand enough to defend the principle in response. If AOL respects e2e in broadband, if it keeps the platform of the network neutral among new uses, if it builds a guarantee into its architecture that innovation will be allowed and encouraged, then we should not worry so much about what AOL owns. Only when it tries to own (through architecture) the right to innovate should we worry...