Republican FCC Allots Us Two Printing Presses - telco or cable
May 25th, 2007 by Gordon Cook
An apt exchange on my list this evening.
Kevin Barron [UC Santa Baraba] wrote: Bandwidth alone can be a red herring. Yes, the case can be made for uncompressed (after all, compression has always been a kludge) HD both audio and video, along with machine to machine communication (no more human bottleneck). 1Gbps today is easily accounted for; soon 10Gbps will similarly be easy to fill (CENIC and I2 are already using 10Gbps interfaces).
Fred Goldstein [Ionary.com]The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility is very strong in the video space. Sure, you can use ten times the resources or more for uncompressed video, but do you get much value out of it? Does it warrant the cost? I suspect that in a truly competitive market (what this FCC has killed), it would rarely be thus.
Kevin Barron More importantly, as Tom West pointed out, it’s about ownership — free speech is only free when you own the means (printing press, etc). Being unconstrained by modems and compression is every bit as important as being unconstrained by other factors.
Fred Goldstein Modems and compression are not a threat to free speech. Deep Packet Inspection is a grave threat.
This FCC’s policy is to allow only two printing presses, and proclaim that there is thus sufficient freedom of speech.