Community Matters

It is fascinating what businesses will do who can see their own business model fail in order to get a free ride on someone else’s business model.

The telcos have received something like 200 Billion dollars from taxpayers and customers to build out the broadband network (not the lame one we have in the US right now, where my 6Mbps DSL link is one of the fastest things around, but the one they promised Congress to build ten years ago that connects most households with 45Mbps glass fiber links). And we, the customers, pay a lot (if compared to other nations like France, Korea, or Germany) for those rather narrow “broadband” links.

But apparently all this isn’t enough. The telcos now want to charge content providers for use of “the cloud” as well. So not only does the end customer pay his or her ISP and telco, and the service provider pay their ISP and telco, they also want to charge for the passage rights in the middle – literally changing the Internet into a set of toll roads.

No wonder that Google is rumored to build it’s own “Internet”.

But if you look at it, this is just another continuation of a trend of companies who are trying to kill progress that threatens their business. Whether it’s Hollywood trying to prevent the VCR, the RIAA and MPAA trying to prevent a digital business model for media delivery, or the telcos trying to prevent growth of online businesses that threaten their voice quasi-monopoly – looking for ways to derail a competitor and disruptor is not a new thing to happen.

But the community that has formed around these online business and online use models must stand up and fight against attempts to derail innovation. If the telcos succeed that will be the end of the Internet as we know it today. And that has brought us so many valuable innovations (like open source, for example), that we clearly want to keep it free to all, as it is today.