connectivity issues

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

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Charles C. Bennett, Jr. suggests:
| Cable companies are licenced by municipality.  Every couple of years
| your local town board gets to make the cable company jump through
| hoops to be allowed to continue to provide service to the locals.
|
| Guess what...  next time AT&T Cable's licence comes up for renewal in
| Arlington, I'll be there with a bunch of other Arlington geeks to make
| sure that unhindered internet service be a prerequisite for licence
| renewal.
|
| Perhaps we can use Slashdot to make sure that this is done as a
| concerted effort in municipalities everywhere.

Good idea in general.  But we do need to learn how  to  explain  what
it's all about in terms that the local regulators understand.

One approach:  Would you buy phone service that only allowed outgoing
calls? Imagine if you and all your friends were restricted like that.
How useful would your phone  be?   Yeah,  you  could  make  calls  to
commercial sites to order things.  That's about all.

Similarly, how useful would snail mail be if you could  only  receive
mail, and only big companies could send it out?

This is the model that the cable companies are working from.   Saying
"no  servers"  means you can't receive incoming connections.  This is
violation of the whole design of the  Internet,  which  is  based  on
point-to-point  messaging.  And it's no more acceptable than it would
be for the phone or postal systems.

The cable companies are basically TV services.  They think of the Net
as a new kind of TV ("with a Buy button", as someone remarked).  They
think the Internet was created back in  '92  to  run  browsers.   And
browsers  were built to give you a better way to see commercial sites
so you can buy things.

The only real way to convince them otherwise is if we do  as  Charles
suggests,  and try to bring pressure on them to deliver real Internet
connectivity.  Otherwise, they'll keep trying to move to an  Internet
in which only big commercial interests are allowed to "broadcast".

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