Prioritization: Bad Idea

December 1st, 2005 | Filed under Rant

Caught this article from wonderful folks of Digg.com. I don’t know if a website has ever altered my surfing habits as quickly as they have. Congrats sirs. Anyway, big Willy Smith, CTO at baby BellSouth told reporters and analysts that an ISP should be able to alter access speed to websites in regards to how much the website pays the ISP, which he calls “prioritization.” Basically this means that the ISP can slow down a site like Google Search, but speed up Yahoo Search if Yahoo pays them. His rational is pretty well summed up in the following quote:

“If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket. In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground.”
-William L. Smith, CTO of BellSouth Corp

This difference between buying tickets and shipping stuff is that I as a consumer have a choice. With the system Smith is proposing the ISP dictates that choice for me. Thanks big brother!

On the side of the good guys is a coalition as well Gigi B. Sohn, who is the President of Public Knowledge (a public rights company), who basically said Smith is just a business man trying to dominate a market and make more money. Sorry BellSouth, but the Internet is now a relative commodity. The real new wave of the net is content…not access. Sohn goes on to explain why it is a bad thing for consumers…if you can imagine that.

“Prioritization is just another word for degrading your competitor. If we want to ruin the Internet, we’ll turn it into a cable TV system.”
-Gigi B. Sohn, President of Public Knowledge

If we really want to section of the internet into old school AOL and Prodigy networks and stifle the openness and overall beauty of the Internet we should listen to Smith’s idea. If not…well, don’t order Internet service from a baby-Bell. Of course the companies who stand to lose the most from this (although small net-based companies would probably lose more because they couldn’t afford to pay) created a coalition to stop Smith and presented this qoute which pretty much says it all:

“The incredible potential of broadband will be severely compromised if network operators are permitted to be the gatekeepers of the Internet, deciding what content, applications and services succeed or fail on the Internet.”
-Coalition including Amazon.com, eBay and Google

I realize my last post was all about not flamming people, but this guy deserves it. It is a bad idea.

Via the Washington Post