Vint Cerf Says Government Needs To Encourage Internet Competition
Vint Cerf said this week that he never intended to seriously propose that the U.S. government should nationalize the Internet. But he does think the Internet is seriously broken, with an economic system that discourages competition and innovation and encourages harmful monopolistic practices. He argued that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which governs Internet service providers, is obsolete and needs to be revised.
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| Vint Cerf |
Cerf, who is vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and sometimes called the "father of the Internet," told a TechCrunch reporter recently that "the Internet should be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways." But after blogged the TechCrunch article, Cerf posted a comment here, saying nationalizing the Internet "was not intended as a serious proposition."
I talked to him about his ideas on Monday.
The current economic model for the Internet gives ISPs monopoly power, allowing them to block some applications and give others a priority track to customers, Cerf said. Most American consumers have at most two options for broadband Internet access -- their local telephone company for DSL, or their cable provider for a cable modem. Many consumers have only one of those options, and others have no broadband at all.
"What we have is not very much competition, and at best two competitors," Cerf said. "Two competitors don't produce the pressure of true competition."
Given the lack of alternatives, consumers have no choice when Internet service providers block some applications (for example, Comcast and other ISPs allegedly blocking BitTorrent). ISPs will likely try to filter traffic further, blocking access to specific applications and companies to increase their own profits. And the U.S. is lagging behind other countries, notably France, the U.K., New Zealand and the Netherlands, in broadband penetration, Cerf said.
"All of this is telling me that we didn't get it right" when the Telecommunication Act of 1996 was adopted, Cerf said. "When we wrote it, the Internet was barely visible to the public, and probably completely invisible to Congress." The Web itself had just started becoming popular two years earlier, Cerf said. "Maybe we should step back and ask ourselves how to do this better," he said.
The Internet is more like they highway system than it is like the phone or cable TV system. Phones and cable TV are networks that were purpose-built for individual applications -- voice and TV, respectively. The Internet is built for any application and information that you can digitize, just like roads are built for any wheeled vehicle, Cerf said.
"Maybe we should treat the Internet more like the road system, look for ways of creating incentives to make the Internet more accessible to everyone, and less likely to be abused by the private sector," Cerf said.
In my earlier blog post, I suggested the problem could be solved without additional government regulation, by encouraging other forms of Internet access, such as WiMAX and satellite Internet. But Cerf said that proposal is impractical -- WiMAX and satellite Internet both have technical problems. Moreover, alternate forms of Internet access will require huge capital investments up-front, and the incumbents -- telcos and cable TV companies - have a nearly unbeatable advantage, since they already have made that investment and serve most of the market.
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