David Isenberg has posted some extremely pithy remarks about the relationship of broadband and “high-quality content” and the end-to-end principle:
Today everybody from George Bush to
Mike Powell to the wise executives of Silicon Valley are
talking about broadband, broadband, broadband. But
broadband without real internetworking, without the pure,
stupid, end-to-end Internet, will be as useful as a
television that can order pizza. I’d rather have the
Internet over a plain-old dial-up connection than broadband
with some form of pseudo-internetworking.So if you hear that somebody is going to “enhance” the
Internet — to make it more efficient, to Pay the
Musicians, to Protect the Children, to thwart hackers, to
enhance Homeland Security, to find Osama, or whatever —
this is almost certainly propaganda from the powerful
businesses that are threatened by the Internet. Remember
that the Internet became the success it is today — and the
threat that it is to existing telcos — because it is a
Stupid Network, an end-to-end network.
(Thanks, Lee!)