Equal Opportunity on the Internet
There are new Facebook and YouTube clones coming up all over; and some of them might just hit upon the next breakthrough concept in crowdsourcing one day. All this hope today is predicated on the belief that a little website built with a YouTube clone script has the same access to consumers as YouTube. But what if YouTube tried to wipe out the competition by paying your ISP to let through YouTube traffic three times as fast as other streaming video sites?
What gives us the confidence that this cannot be done today is the law; in the US for example, the FCC rules that to any Internet user, every website must be available with no discrimination involved. It is free access to this powerful method of communication that has turned the Internet into a powerhouse of innovation. But there is a little caveat there: ISPs may arrange special deals to put YouTube or anyone through quicker, if they will offer that deal to other companies too on the same terms. Suddenly the right to freedom of expression doesn’t seem that free anymore.
The US government is beginning to debate whether allowing special deals is unfair. They believe that the major players, if they were not allowed special terms would have no reason to continue to use their platform for better innovation. Why would they continue to invest, make their service bigger and better, when just about any small clone could get the same terms as them, they reason. This doesn’t make real sense; true innovation usually comes from the small players, as the big ones are usually too busy defending their turf. Google Voice, for instance, started out as a service to allow you to cheaply call anyone everywhere; but when it emerged that calls to rural areas in the US were to be more expensive to Google, it quickly decided to drop rural coverage. Google abandoned the innovation of wide and uniformly priced coverage to financial priorities. Wouldn’t it slow innovation down if small players in this market were given unequal terms?
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