So the European telcos are now jumping on the bandwagon started in the US of crying “foul” to the consequencies of their flawed business models and seeking to charge ‘more’ for delivering high bandwidth content from the likes of Google and Yahoo.  Take for example Mr Kai Uwe Ricke, chief executive of Deutsche Telekom.  He says, “It shouldn’t be the case that infrastructure providers, like Deutsche Telekom are always having to make the investments, while other profit on the back of those”.

 To Herr Ricke I say,  “Then DON’T invest!  Let those who have a sound utility based business model and adhere to the OPLAN concept make the investment.  They will not be looking for the excessive returns and short payback that you have hood-winked your shareholders into expecting over the past 50 years.  And you have only be able to do it because of the sector specific public policy and regualtion which you and the telecoms sector has had a large hand in fashioning.  This flawed public policy as muted the powerful liberating impact for consumers of the disruptive digital technologies of abundance”

But this will be a battle royal as old-guard telcos start lobbying big-and-hard for this ‘two-speed internet’.  Already this is throwing up some bizarre and disturbing arguments.  Writing recently (March 16^th) in the Financial Times on “network neutrality”, the American, Douglas Holtz-Eakin (Director of the Center for Geoeconomic Studies) did just that.  Noting that those of us who would want to ensure that the internet remains a wide open medium have, (in the US at least), started to lobby Congress to enact legislation to ensure this “openness” is preserved, he comments, “There is no rôle for government in managing the evolution to new business models and consumer products” .

Now that’s a bit rich Mr Holtz-Eakin, when considering what is surely the greatest government-created and sustained global cartel the world has ever known – the telecommunications industry.

Were the conventional telecoms sector around the world to be truly cut free from government intervention and regulation - based as it is on the pretext of ‘managing the evolution to new business models and consumer products’, then the sector as we know it would have been disrupted out of existence long ago by these very innovative digital technologies of abundance that are now causing it such anguish.  As it is, the protection of decades of carefully fashioned, complex sector specific regulation and public policy framed around consulting “stakeholders” is precisely what the telecoms sector relies on to force-fit its obsolete business model (generating revenue from ‘allocating scarcity”) onto the rapidly emerging digital world of ‘outrageous abundance’.   So Mr Holtz-Eakin, it is simply not true to claim that the telecommunications industry as we know it has “….flowed naturally from market forces” as you did in your article.

So it is against this entirely ‘government sustained perpetuation’ of the sector as currently structured that those now lobbying for “internet neutrality” find themselves trying to ensure that the disruptive onward march of digital technologies is left free to benefit end users.  End users in an open market, and not governments, should indeed determine who are stake-holders or stake-losers.  No industry has the right to expect the state to legislate to ensure that it survives against a ‘better mousetrap’.  But having made the mistake of legislating for decades to do just that in the telecoms sector, surely we now have the right, indeed the obligation, to lobby our politicians to intervene and mitigate the damage caused by their decisions of yesteryear and let natural market forces, shaped by disruptive technologies, deliver our future – a future of net neutrality. 

 As Michael Powell said before he left the FCC as Chairman,

“Right now we are in this terrible position in which companies’ regulatory treatment is more a function of whence they came than what they are currently doing.  And this arbitrariness is cracking up, in my opinion,  the legal regime and the courage we need is to throw it out – it is to bring it down and re-level the field to understand what a ‘bit-is-a-bit’ really means.  First of all desire to drive infrastructures in that way -  business models in that way, and then force the law to open up horizontally as well and  stop having government so involved.”

Right on Mr Powell!