The Broadband War of 2006

THE BROADBAND WAR OF 2006
[SOURCE: Fortune, AUTHOR: Justin Fox]
[Commentary] Say you run a telephone company. You're spending billions to string superfast Internet connections to American homes. Why wouldn't you want to use those broadband pipes -- which your shareholders paid for -- to block competitors, to sell services, to sign sweetheart deals with content providers? Then again, say you run a company that has prospered (or hopes to do so) on the open-access Internet. Why wouldn't you want to keep things that way, to prevent the cable and telephone companies that dominate high-speed Internet access from unleveling a playing field that has seen such stupendous innovation and wealth creation? That's the gist of the net neutrality debate. The economics of the debate are not as straightforward as they first seem. If our hypothetical telco executive got his way entirely, he'd strangle the very Internet he hoped to profit from. And if the Web exec got everything he wanted, the telcos might not build the true broadband links (vs. the moderately fast ones available now) needed to unleash a new explosion of online creativity and profit. It's a war, then, that we should hope nobody wins.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/21/technology/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm?s...