Jeff Pulver, the VoIP Pioneer and recent Second Life land owner, has some very interesting view on the new political climate in the US after the midterm elections. While most of the other commentary I have read talked about the changes coming for the White House, the Iraq War, and other matters that would find place them squarely outside of the domain of a the Second Life Insider, Pulver hit the heart of the issue that should be on the minds of every Second Life resident, net neutrality. Net Neutrality, best explained by the John Stewart clip above, is big companies taking over the Internet and regulating traffic based on a fee scale. If a company like Second Life, which has had success but is not quite on the fortune 500 list, wants enough bandwidth to run a virtual world they will have to pay larger fees to ISPs to keep their content flowing, possibly eating into their margins to the point that they shut their virtual doors.
So, what does Pulver think is going to happen to Net Neutrality now that the Democrats have power in congress? This:
"...the shift in power tips the balance to the Net Neutrality forces and puts the Bells on the defensive for the first time since passage of the "96 Telecom Act" as they continue their efforts to obtain video franchising relief. Perhaps this means there is a potential compromise in the works...While the Internet application providers and users might win on the Net Neutrality front, I harbor no great expectations that the Democrats will be any less paternalistic than their Republican corollaries on the social issues affecting the Internet and communications...without any serious regard for the deleterious effects on innovation and progress."
1. You would think Net Neutrality is the Holy Gospel printed on stone tablets and delivered from the Mount the way the Lindens bless it and all their acolytes reiterate it like myrmidons.
But there is a range of legitimate opinion around this, and you don't have to be a redneck SUV driving Bush-voting Neandrathal to ask a simple question: who pays? How do you get this stuff paid for? Bandwidth is a scarce resource -- so who gets it? And who decides?
And if we're supposed to cringe at telecoms charing huge fees to access something like a streaming video world, then why would we accept it's correlary which is the Net Neutrality gang's answer insider SL -- which is, let LL raise all the island and mainland tiers, double them within a month or two, and make the consumer pay, instead of having the ISP charge the big fee. So...the cost is merely displaced to people inworld, so that everybody can pat themselves on the back and say, wow, we fought the good fight and kept the Net Neutral.
So who pays?
Posted at 4:13AM on Nov 13th 2006 by Prokofy Neva