Four Eyed Monsters has a great, great video on the topic of network neutrality, a vitally important premise that the Internet be an identical experience for all no matter who provides the connection to the Internet. Most people will recognize Larry Lessig, but you may not recognize Bruce Kushnick of teletruth.org, who is one of the most vocal critics of the actions of the telecommunications companies who hope to limit or change the way their customers access the Internet so that they can benefit financially from those changes.
What’s interesting about the debate on network neutrality is that Japan and Korea have significant deployments of fiber optic services (i.e. 100 Mb/sec. +) to residential services. Network neutrality has never been an issue in Asia.
“Network neutrality has never been an issue in Asia.”
That should read “Network neutrality has never been an issue in Asia yet….” (or at least as far as Japan is concerned), given that here in Japan the physical infrastructure oligolpoly has started making noises about the fact that they forsee a potential need for differenetiated delivery services on their next generation networks. The fact is people like NTT spending a lot of money on services infrastructure, but if they lose out to pure service players who “freeload” on their physical infrastructure, I don’t think there is any question that political pressure is going to be brought to bear…..