COPYCENSE

“At the top of my wish list for next year’s Consumer Electronics Show is this: the introduction of broadband service across the country that is as up to date as that 103-inch flat-screen monitor just introduced by Panasonic. The digital lifestyle I see portrayed so alluringly in ads is not possible when the Internet plumbing in our homes is as pitiful as it is. The broadband carriers that we have today provide service that attains negative perfection: low speeds at high prices.

“It gets worse. Now these same carriers – led by Verizon Communications and BellSouth – want to create entirely new categories of fees that risk destroying the anyone-can-publish culture of the Internet. And they are lobbying for legislative protection of their meddling with the Internet content that runs through their pipes. These are not good ideas.”

Randall Stross. Hey, Baby Bells: Information Still Wants to Be Free. The New York Times. Jan. 15, 2006.

See also:

Lessig Blog. The Fiction Zone That DC Has Become. Jan 13, 2006.

Between the Lines. The Bandwidth Scarcity Myth. Jan. 11, 2006.

Patrick Barnard. A Two-Tiered Internet in Our Future? TMCnet. Jan. 10, 2006.

Gigaom. Need For Speed… How Real? Dec. 20, 2005.

Philip J. Weiser and Thomas Bleha. Which Broadband Nation? Foreign Affairs. September/October 2005.

Thomas Bleha. Down to the Wire. Foreign Affairs. May/June 2005.

(Editor’s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.