Apple Considers Buying A Piece of the Airwaves

by: Matt Stoller

Mon Sep 10, 2007 at 23:33

Perhaps this is the kind of economic illiteracy we should expect from people who get their information from "The Daily Show" and the Daily Kos. But isn't it time for the rest of us to move on and acknowledge that the days of the online free lunch are over?

Of course, what's actually happening is that Comcast is randomly cutting off paying customers for downloading 'too much' without telling them what the download limit is.  Fortunately, shills like Pearlstein may soon become irrelevant in this fight, as Apple is considering making a game-changing move in our communications infrastructure.  Steve Jobs is eyeing a piece of the spectrum we fought for earlier this year and helped set partially free. 

Still, it's probable that several Silicon Valley companies will bid, including but not limited to Google.  Should one of them win the spectrum and build out an open network, this increases dramatically the changes of an overall win on net neutrality.  Once we get real competition in wireless broadband, game set match for the worst of the cable and telecom nonsense.  We'll still have a lot of work to do, but the darkest scenarios will never come to pass.

After all, net neutrality is really just a regulatory solution to a lack of competition in broadband markets.  If you introduce real competition, there's less of a problem with net neutrality anymore.  Art Brodsky in his latest amazing column compared the choices you get in this country, which usually boils down to two providers at most, such as Verizon or Comcast, to the choices you get in a country like England that has a sane policy of 'open access' for its internet infrastructure.

Here's a spreadsheet of all the choices you get in England.