I was a bit disappointed to see Chris Marsden berating Jean-Bernard Lévy, Chairman of Vivendi, for his recent article in ParisTech Review. Admittedly, the piece is not terribly erudite – what do you expect from a company chairman? – but it’s ideas deserve more than Marsden’s dismissal of it as ‘how to end net neutrality’. Yes, it’s a pretty naked bit of lobbying on behalf of a network operator (frustrated with the lack of sympathy so far shown by Neelie Kroes) but it does at least pose some of the right questions, e.g.
“How do we ensure that exponential increases in demand for bandwidth continue to be met both today and tomorrow? What hurdles must be overcome in the race to deploy ultra-high speed networks in the face of a less than favorable economic climate?”
Marsden’s attack is evidently directed at Lévy’s suggestions on ‘rethinking network management’ but the article also touches on ‘the dynamics of co-investment’ and the elusive concept of a 'two-sided business model' for the recovery of access costs. The latter is an idea that has been relatively hot stuff in economist circles for nearly a dozen years but has so far failed to gain wider attention. It’s essentially the rationale for me not paying Visa for the use of a credit card or, more to the point, why I don’t pay Firefox or Google for the use of their search engines. In the broadband access market, the traditional arrangement is that access costs are levied exclusively on retail subscribers but, in a two-sided business model, these costs might be shared in other ways. Chris Marsden and other net neutrality advocates reject the possibility of such experiments, insisting on maintenance of the current charging regime. (Doesn’t that amount to price regulation?). In the interests of progressing the vital debate on new network investment, let’s not stifle these ideas…
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