This is why Caesar’s legions were not allowed to cross the Rubicon. How do we go back now? For the Internet to work at broadband capacity and reap the economic benefits from that situation we must reverse the trend of combining network ownership with content and service provision.

Broadband must be a commodity.

More at, “Raw Economics: Google-Verizon CoOpoly Galvanize Net Neutrality” http://bit.ly/bVWsLZ

I’m sure we also all agree that the behaviour of mobile operators does not lead us to trust their motives, there are some very basic practical problems that need to be managed in the the real world. It is a great shame that nobody on the show appeared to really understand, or care about, the major differences between fixed line and mobile networks. In a fixed line world you don’t get the problem of how to prevent a bunch of people unexpectedly gathering in one place (a single cell) and preventing someone from making an emergency call by endlessly streaming multimedia content. One technique to manage this, and to prevent your movie streaming from stuttering too much, is to carefully manage how different content streams are handled (e.g. traffic shaping). This contravenes the fundamentalist’s net neutrality scriptures – but most sane people firstly want an Internet that works – with neutrality as an important secondary goal.

So please, less ranting and paranoia and more well researched analysis of a very difficult situation. Don’t forget that these “problems” are mainly caused by all of us obsessively using our beloved iPhones, iPads and Anroid phones as if the there was an infinite (and preferably free) resource delivering us what we want – and there isn’t!

Anything that uses whopping amounts of bandwidth will be moved from open internet to a subscription category on a controlled pipe at a price level causing significant financial pain to the consumer but at the same time not killing their purchasing power, all in a way that would make Torquemada proud.