Common Carriage goes way beyond our lifes. Eli Noam's write up in 1994
is a good one.
http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/citi/citinoam11.html
Beyond Liberalization II:
The Impending Doom of Common Carriage
Eli M. Noam
Professor of Finance and Economics
Columbia University, Graduate School of Business
March 15, 1994
I. Introduction 1
This article argues that the institution of common carriage,
historically the foundation of the way telecommunications are delivered,
will not survive. To clarify: "common carriers" (the misnomer often used
to refer to telephone companies) will continue to exist, but the status
under which they operate -- offering service on a non-discriminatory
basis, neutral as to use and user -- will not.
...
VII. A Contract-Carrier Based Telecommunications System?
The conclusion of the analysis has been that common carriage will erode
in time, and that a hybrid co-existence will not be stable. This is not
to say that the common carriers qua carriers will become extinct; many
of them will remain significant players, but they will conduct their
business as contract carriers. But common carriage as such will
disappear. This will not happen overnight, of course. Intermediate
arrangements can buy several decades of transition time. But the basic
dynamics will eventually assert themselves.
This conclusion is reached with much regret, because the socially
positive aspects of common carriage are strong, and because the absence
to common carriage often means gatekeeper power. But we should not let
preferences obscure the clarity of analysis.
Bob
Jason just did a beautiful thread as to what was the original source
of the network neutrality
bittorrent vs voip bufferbloat blowup.
https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1707078242857849244
Seeing all the political activity tied onto it since (and now again)
reminds of two families at war about an incident that had happened
generations and generations before, where the two sides no longer
remembered why they hated each other so, but just went on hating, and
not forgiving, and not moving on.
Yes, there are entirely separate and additional NN issues, but the
technical problem of providing common carriage between two very
different network application types (voip/gaming vs file transfer) is
thoroughly solved now, and if only all sides recognised at least this
much, and made peace over it, and worked together to deploy those
solutions, maybe, just maybe, we could find mutually satisfactory
solutions to the other problems that plague the internet today, like
security, and the ipv6 rollout.
If anyone here knows anyone more political, still vibrating with 10+
years of outrage about NN on this fronts, on one side or the other, if
you could sit them down, over a beer, and try to explain that at the
start it was a technical problem nobody understood at the time, maybe
that would help.
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