Word: broadband
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...Microsoft's Bill Gates, that has meant wiring our libraries to 21st century broadband standards--in some of the same buildings that Andrew Carnegie built in the early 1900s. For Gates, it has also meant tackling a host of infectious diseases in the Third World. Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale is spending $100 million to teach more kids to read in his native Mississippi, which ranks near the bottom in state rankings of literacy. Jim Clark, legendary founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon, has pledged $150 million for a biomedical-research facility at Stanford. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay...
Bandwidth is the ability to move bits. Broadband is the ability to move a lot of bits per second. Though everybody seems to do it, likening bandwidth to the diameter of a pipe is misleading, because our consumption of bits is not analogous to drinking from a garden or fire hose. We don't necessarily consume bits in a continuous fashion (like water), and even if we did, that does not perforce mean our computers have to receive them that...
...this may change, however, as Internet access moves from narrowband (telephones) to broadband (predominantly cable). Cable companies are not required to respect e2e; they are allowed to discriminate. Unlike telephone companies, they get to choose which "new ideas" will run on cable's network. They get to block services they don't like. Already many limit the streaming of video to computers (while charging a premium for streaming video to televisions). And this is only the beginning. The list of blocked uses is large and growing...
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...
...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...