Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality

Is the New York Times going all wobbly?

Adam Cohen, in a naively one-sided piece this morning entitled "Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End", tells us that the demise of Net Neutrality will undermine "the most democratic mass medium there has ever been."

Cohen bases the article on the pro Net Neutrality views of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The problem, however, with the piece is that Sir Tim's arguments aren't at all convincing.

Cohen says that the debate really is about the cost of broadcasting video which the service providers want to charge for. According to Sir Tim, most innovative days of video on the Internet are still to come:

"Sir Tim expects that there are great Internet innovations yet to come, many involving video. He believes people at the scene of an accident — or a political protest — will one day be able to take pictures with their cellphones that could be pieced together to create a three-dimensional image of what happened. That sort of innovation could be blocked by fees for the high-speed connections required to relay video images."

Sorry, Sir Tim, but you sounds to me like just another Web 2.0 entrepreneur trying to pitch a me-too online video business. Do we really need a 3-D image of a political protest taken from people's cellphones? Where's the real value here, either in commercial or political terms? Aren't traditional photographs or simple words sufficient to describe political protests and accidents?

If this is the best argument that the pro Net Neutrality people can muster, then I'm on the side of the large telecoms and cable companies who, Cohen and Sir Tim warn us, are trying to exclude the "smaller, poorer Web sites" from reaching out to a "potential audience of billions."

Yawn. How awful.

Comments

[Joachim]

you are wrong and horribly glib. This is truly awful. You sound like an arrogant German socialist in 1930, poo-poo'ing the threat of Nazism.

The telecoms & cable companies really do want to destroy the core democratic values of the web. Why else are they pushing so hard and investing so much money and time in their fight against Net Neutrality?

[ghoti06]

Joachim, slow down! First of all, the web was never about democracy first and foremost -- it was about surviving nuclear holocaust.

Second, I'd like to see some proof that the telecom industry wants to "destroy" anything about your web experience. The reason they're fighting it is because new laws would put a cork in their plans to offer new services. It's pretty simple, and there's no conspiracy.

I work with the Hands Off coalition, so you know where I stand on this. But I can't let wild allegations stand. Andrew's "meh, this is overrated" stance is much more on target.

[andrew keen]

good point on the nuclear issue.

I agree about the telecom industry rationale here. What bothers me about the whole thing is the sanctimoniousness of the pro Net Neutrality crowd. They've blown up the debate (which is really really complex) into a morally black and white issue. Such moralizing (see the Times piece) ultimately does nobody any good.