December 21st, 2006
Net Neutrality foes seize on Sony Playstation-Akamai deal
From the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center For The Study of Digital Property’s IPCentral.info blog:
(High bandwidth Web hosting and distribution service) Akamai and Sony have struck a deal whereby Akamai will distribute Sony’s PLAYSTATION Network. The news story, translated from Japanese, says:
Through the use of Akamai’s distributed delivery services, unlike alternative offerings that rely on centralized data-center servers located domestically, it becomes possible to achieve greater reliability and scale by delivering added value to ubiquitous terminals, such as cell phones. Akamai’s dynamic content delivery capabilities also ensure high performance and reliability of dynamically-rendered, personalized Web content.
My translation of the translation is that Sony is going to get premium service and will, undoubtedly, pay a premium price.
All right, you proponents of net neutrality, fill in the blank: “This is bad because…”
OK, I hear ya, PFF. Battle is joined.
It’s not bad. The best deployment here is not over the Internet, but through a closed platform. But as those weight-loss ads say in small print or mumbled tones: “results not typical.”
See, my problem is with engineering-centered net neutrality opponents that say because of these enhanced digital delivery services, enacting meaningful net neutrality legislation is not possible. They, and some of the anti-regulation fanatics like, well, the “Progress” and “Freedom Foundation,” are among the first to yell “Socialism.”
These debunkers have a certain inevitability to them about high-bandwidth Internet services. Kind of like saying, you’ll always have the rich, and the poor.
And the PFF are the ultimate economic and social Darwinists. These are the folks who think free markets have both an intelligence and a morality about them. Let the telecoms charge as much as they want, and if people don’t like it, they won’t buy and prices will come down.
In an age where almost every company cares about what the institutional investors and private equity shareholders want (max shareholder value but of course) to the near-exclusion of other factors, that’s just unrealistic.
The markets are far more short-sighted and greedy than enlightened. We need a constraining force. And only government is powerful enough to providethat force.
Unlike what conservative trolls keep saying, that constraining force isn’t “Socialistic.” Applied properly, and without too much of a choke-collar, tt is enlighted and humane.
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Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
