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IP: More on Who determines who your isp should be
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 02:05:13 -0500
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
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- IP: More on Who determines who your isp should be Dave Farber (Nov 29)