Posted in NYTIMES today:

If bush hadn't taken over the white house like he did, we would be well on our way to having a far more robust national information infrastructure.

This story reminds me of a story in Wired's Danger Room Blog on July 11 about roads in Chad: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/07/chads-budding-r.html

See, because the government of Chad has shirked its responsibility to take care of the roads, "entrepreneurial road blockers" have popped up all over the place, who will not let you drive through unless you pay them the proper bribe.

That only happens in a lawless environment where real roads are not built, and nobody polices such criminal activity.

In 1987, when Al Gore wrote the high performance computing act, instead of running fiber to each person's home, like he originally wanted, in a compromise with Ronald Reagan, the government took the much less ambitious step of merely connecting the government's Arpanet to existing commercial networks owned by sprint, mci, etc.

The problem now, though, is because bush has dropped the ball on upgrading to Internet 2, and because he has not put any money into deploying the public Internet, or bringing public fiber to homes, entrepreneurial road blockers have been popping up here, in the usa.

they are no different than the ones in chad. They don't own all the roads, but just enough of them to monopolize many lanes for their own phone and tv services and to set up not only road blocks, but airport style searches too. what's next? are they going to scrutinize every single byte that comes and goes from my computer?

Honestly there is only one solution.

We must deploy the public Internet. We must upgrade it, and bring it all the way to people's homes. It must go back to being a network from people to people, where nobody in particular is in charge, and nobody needs to ask permission to do anything.

We cannot count on monopolistic cable and phone companies for this vital service. There is so much more the Internet can be and they have held us back to 1970's-1980's speeds (10mbit-50mbit) for far too long already.

Only when we have bidirectional multi-gigabit speeds will we start to see the next horizon in what we can do as a society. the next amazon, google, and ebay are just waiting for this upgrade. they will never come into existence if we allow these road blocking isps take over completely.

so it's not just about "net neutrality," which is vital, of course. its about having a robust international information infrastructure. iii. let's do it. I know we can.