Vint Cerf, Father of the Internet and a vice president with Google, mentioned this week that the company might file antitrust complaints against telco and cablecos that block the Internet traffic of competing services. A piece on Yahoo! has more detail.
“If we are not successful in our arguments … then we will simply have to wait until something bad happens and then we will make known our case to the Department of Justices anti-trust division,” {Cerf] said on Tuesday.
I think a claim of anti-trust violation only really works against broadband providers if the DOJ and courts can accept a claim that a monopoly of Layers 1 and 2 (and perhaps Layer 3) of the OSI layer are being unfairly leveraged to establish control over the other layers of the OSI stack. Im not sure how well such an argument will resonate. I think this is a difficult argument to make to the legal types, as the legal types who dominate our legislative branch of government clearly have not understood net neutrality. The lobbyists representing the incumbent broadband providers have done a very good job confusing this issue.
Speaking of confusion, listen to this attempt by Senator Ted Stevens (R, AK) to explain how the Internet works and net neutrality. Its really, really painful.
Tags: Net Neutrality
