Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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Solutions
Long before the mainstreaming of the Internet, the Cable Television Consumer
Protection and Competition Act of 1992 allowed local broadcast television stations
to demand that cable TV companies carry their signal, and established a
limited regime of open-access cable channels. 23 This was understandably far
from a free-for-all of actual “signal neutrality” because the number of channels
a cable service could transmit was understood to be limited. 24 The must-carry
policies—born out of political pressure by broadcasters and justified as a way of
eliminating some bottleneck control by cable operators—have had little discernable
effect on the future of cable television, except perhaps to a handful of
home shopping and religious broadcasting stations that possess broadcast licenses
but are of little interest to large television viewerships. 25 Because cable
systems of 1992 had comparatively little bandwidth, and because the systems
were designed almost solely to transmit television and nothing else, the Act had
little impact on the parched generative landscape for cable.
Mobile telephony, often featuring a tight relationship between service providers
and endpoint devices used by their subscribers, has also drawn calls for
mandated neutrality. Recall the Carterfone case from Chapter Two, which compelled
AT&T to open the endpoints of its monopoly telephone network—that
is, mobile phones—to third-party hardware providers. 26 Tim Wu has called for
a Carterfone rule for mobile phone service providers, allowing consumers to select
whatever handset they want to work on the network, and Skype has petitioned
the FCC for such a rule—at just the time that, like the old AT&T, Steve
Jobs insists that the iPhone must be tethered to Apple and forced to use AT&T
as its network provider “to protect carrier networks and to make sure the phone
was not damaged.” 27 The analogy between AT&T and telephones on the one
hand and mobile phone providers and handsets on the other is strong, and it
works because there is already an understood divide between network and device
in both cases. But because a cable or satellite TV company’s regular service
is intertwined with a content offering—the channels—and a specialized appliance
to recognize proprietary transmission encryption schemes—the set-top
box—it has been significantly harder to implement the spirit of Carterfone for
cable television. 28 A model that begins as sterile is much harder to open
meaningfully to third-party contribution than one that is generative from the
start.
We see a parallel discrepancy of attitudes between PCs and their counterpart
information appliances. Microsoft was found to possess a monopoly in
the market for PC operating systems. 29 Indeed, it was found to be abusing
that monopoly to favor its own applications—such as its Internet Explorer