IP: More on Who determines who your isp should be

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 00:57:07 -0500
To: farber () cis upenn edu
From: Bob Schmidt <schmidt () magicnet net>
Subject: Re: IP: Who determines who your isp should be

Dave,

> IF your local telephone monopoly decided that it alone could be your
> Internet service provider when you went online via your telephone wire,
> you would be outraged. Yet that's precisely what your local cable-TV
> monopoly insists on when it provides Net access.

It is hard to see how  anyone other than AOL stands to benefit from what
AOL wants from the cable companies.  Certainly AOL users should be able to
take advantage of competition and sign up with the cable company if they
want to. Just as they can now sign up with a local  or national ISP. In
either case the user will say goodbye to AOL as an ISP, though the user may
decide to keep AOL as a proprietary online service.

The more AOL presses the cable issue the sooner it will become a strategy
that backfires. Because ultimately,  if the cable company has to be a
common carrier just because the phone company is a common carrier, then by
the same logic AOL and all ISP's -- from the small independent to the
nationals to the backbone providers -- will also have to be common
carriers. And being a common carrier is probably the last thing AOL wants
to be.  And bottomline, either the cable company is a cable company or it
is a phone company. But if cable is really telephone, then what are ISP's
who are already designated as enhanced telephone service providers? Why
can't the cable company be an ISP -- i.e. an enhanced telephone service or
even an online service -- just like AOL?

The online services -- AOL and Compuserve in particular -- want to be
private members-only online country clubs setting rules for their members
and keeping an eye on their members one minute and be exempt from liability
for liable and defamation and not keeping an eye on their members the next
. They don't want to offer common carrier services to their own members,
yet they say the sky is falling if anyone else tries to do the same thing.
The hypocrisy runs so high it is unbelievable.

Although I certainly would prefer that all Internet services be sold on a
common carrier basis, bringing this about merely to protect AOL is
ridiculous. It is hard to imagine that the same company that is perceived
as big enough to constitute a threat to Microsoft could be seriously
threatened by a cable company, not to mention the downsides to cable
access: the high speed doesn't scale, cable company reliability is poor,
and the entire cable industry has always been plagued by promise vs.
performance issues.


Bob Schmidt
www.provider.com
Author of The Geek's Guide to Internet Business Success
Published by John Wiley & Sons   ISBN 0471288381
The First Book to Address the Business Side of the Web Design Business
http://www.provider.com/geeksguide