"Craig McTaggart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> (2) AOL and @Home are showing that in the consumer market, brands
> count, and the Internet on training wheels is actually something
> that is desired among the general public. [...]
> My concern is that with near-complete control over local access,
> @Home has no incentive to tell the blinking-VCR-clock crowd that
> .car exists, but if they worked out a marketing deal with .gm, .gm
> would be plastered all over the start page.
The large providers research their subscriber/customer base, so we can
be fairly confident that what appears on the start pages they provide
is something that's desired by a substantial portion of their
customers. This seems fair. It's not perfect. It's also
self-selecting. The type of person who wants to see .car is most
likely not going to sign up with a large provider. More likely they
are going to be the type of person who selects an ISP that allows them
to modify their environment to choose whatever they want to look at.
Whether or not such ISPs can survive your future market where they may
not be able to compete on QoS, peering, transit, etc. is an open
question. One thing they have going for them is that many of the
people who work in the field use "raw Internet" services, so there are
a fair amount of $$$ available to keep this type of thing going. It's
a viable niche market, in other words.
> Issues like peering/transiting/settlements and instant messaging
> suggest to me that the current Internet model may be something of a
> relic of a different past, which I'm less confident than others can
> survive its very different future. So I'm trying to think about
> what makes the Internet the way it is, what threatens that, and on
> what basis we might insist that it be preserved. An Internet
> community which instantly devours anyone who suggests there is
> anything more than autonomous, private action going here may be
> dooming itself to domination by better-organized and better-funded
> forces. Sound familiar?
I'm not sure that 'we' ought to be insisting that anything be
preserved ... after all, wouldn't we be like ICANN then, telling
others what to do? :) Seriously, these are difficult questions. I
just try to present people with information and let them decide what
to do about it.
Most people just don't have the time to spend deeply researching a
technology to find out how it works and what "should" or "shouldn't"
happen with it. For example, I know very little about how my local
water or electricity is served to me. Should I know more about it?
Perhaps. But that would take quite a bit of time, and leave me with
much less time to study these issues. Even if I were to devote my
life to studying policy issues, would I have enough time to study all
of them sufficiently so that if it came time for me to decide what
'governance' I wanted, I would make the 'right' choices?
--gregbo
