When I started reading this story about an effort to use radio bandwidth to provide ubiquitous, cheap or free (ad-supported), broadband internet access across the country, I started to get happy. But then I saw the dolts who were proposing this and the dangerous things they doing and I want to make sure they don’t get anywhere near our internet. At the end of the story, The Times reports:
M2Z plans to include a filter with the free service that would block access to “indecent” material, a definition Mr. Sachs said could be made by the government, just as it controls standards for broadcast television.
“Give us the spectrum and we’ll provide free service and we’ll live with the decency guidelines,” Mr. Sachs said.
If this post were a podcast, you’d hear an anguished and angry scream right now. Evil fools. They invite government censorship of our internet, a Trojan horse that would only lead to more censorship (insert idiotic level-playing-field argument here).
Just as idiotic, they want the government to give them that spectrum for free. Ha! Yes, let’s get ubiquitous, free, broadband internet access across America as a strategic imperative. But let’s auction that business off to the best players. And let’s require net neutrality.
So who are these fools? The Times says:
Milo Medin, chairman and chief technology officer of M2Z, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., declined to discuss the company’s plans. Mr. Medin, a founder of the @Home Network, a high-speed Internet company that became Excite@Home and went bankrupt in 2001, started the company with John Muleta, a former head of the wireless division at the F.C.C.
@Home: The Enron of the Internet. These bozos lost billions and botched an easy opportunity to bring internet access to almost every home in the country once and now we’re supposed to give them bandwidth?
It’s worse than that. @Home tried to strongarm content providers a decade ago, telling them that if they did not make proprietary and premium deals with @Home and allow the service to cache and serve their content — and pay for the privilege — then @Home would not give them full-speed access. They were the first enemies of net neutrality. And who was the architect of this dastardly scheme? Guess.
Keep these dangerous dolts away from our Internet.
