I had an interesting discussion this afternoon with some family members about the challenges of living within our celebrated Canadian health care system.
It seems that conversations about privatizing portions of the system always seem to polarize people. The main concerns are creation of two tiers of health care and taking resources away from the vulnerable. The assumption is always that the public side will lose the best providers.
Which seems to me to be an acknowledgement that we are not properly compensating the health care providers. But this isn’t a blog about health care; how, Professor does this connect to Telecom Trends?
I’m glad you asked. It seems to me that discussions about Network Neutrality have some elements in common with the debates about universal health care. People who are concerned about the emergence of a multi-tier Internet are ignoring the fact that business already has created just that. Not satisfied with the vagaries of public internet quality of service, enterprise IP networks are often built on private or managed networks. Much like the wealthy and our politicians seem to be able to jump the queue for MRIs and elective surgery.
Complaints about evil, profit minded ‘broadband monopolists‘ (as Russell Shaw calls them) sound like the way the Toronto Star writes about those evil American firms offering MRIs and CT scans to Canadians. How dare they want to offer a service that people are willing to pay for at a price that makes sense for the investors! Quick, we need legislation to protect these feeble minded citizens who don’t know how to make decisions for themselves.
At the same time, I agree that there is much to be said for the creativity and breadth of applications that have been generated using the current model of open internet – just as there is much to be said for the Canadian principle that says you don’t lose your life savings just because you got sick.
Is it not possible to have both public and private models co-exist? When mediocrity [and I say that in the nicest possible way!] is good enough, the current model works just fine. But if an application, or an application provider, needs something more, what is wrong with them paying to get it?
It would help if someone can explain the wide-open view without resorting to Communist style language that I thought died out when the Berlin Wall fell. Let’s have an open discussion of the issues without resorting to calling telcos and cablecos ‘broadband monopolists’. If Bay Street or Wall Street really believed that there is a monopoly for broadband access, BCE wouldn’t still be hovering below $30.