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Cuban looks beyond net neutrality - May 11, 2007

I almost didn’t recognize the famously dishabille HDNet founder and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban as he stepped up to the witness table in the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing room Thursday because he was wearing a suit.

But even the buttoned-down culture of Capitol Hill couldn’t really contain the maverick Maverick.

While members of the subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet waxed effusive over the other innovators and entrepreneurs on the witness panel, which included Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian, TiVo CEO Tom Rogers and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, Cuban brushed their inventions off as solutions to the wrong problem.

“The fact that we’re here means we’ve jumped the shark,” Cuban said, using showbiz slang for a TV show that has run out of ideas and is reduced to gimmicks to maintain ratings. “We’re putting constraints of 10 minutes on a video, we’re having to have Slingbox because there’s not enough bandwidth to go around, we’re having to store things to our TiVos because we can’t just get it how we want it, where we want it, when we want it. Those are all responses to constrained bandwidth. If we had enough bandwidth, all of that goes away, all of those constraints disappear.”

So too, presumably, would the market caps of the other companies on the panel.

I couldn’t see the faces of the other witnesses, but if they understood his point they probably weren’t smiling. (Archived video of the hearing can be found here.)

The same goes for members of the subcommittee, which was holding its fifth hearing in a series on the Digital Future of the United States.

The committee’s signature issue—Net neutrality—is the wrong debate about the wrong issue, Cuban insisted. Another response to scarcity that is likely to result in the wrong outcome.

“The issue of net neutrality is the perfect example of how constrained bandwidth creates conflicts between the interests of consumers and broadband providers,” Cuban said. “But this issue goes away completely if bandwidth constraints go away.

I have great sympathy for the instincts of those who want to require Internet service providers to treat all content equally.

The idea of giving profit-seeking companies the power to regulate my access to information strikes me as depressing and potentially undemocratic. Not because profit-seeking evil but simply because its object is profit, not information, and some kinds of information will always be more profitable than others.

But Cuban has a point.

Focusing on ensuring access to scarce bandwidth—even celebrating innovative responses to the scarcity for that matter—does nothing to create more bandwidth, which ought to be the goal of any public policy, and could even entrench it as a matter of policy.

“Right now, because of what’s happening here via the [companies represented on the panel], and other companies, is we are consuming all of the [bandwidth] that’s available,” Cuban said. “And we’re arguing over who gets it, and how we should argue about who gets it, when in reality we should be focusing on how do we get bandwidth to the next level so that the constraints go away.”

Even Cuban, though, had no detailed prescription for how to do that, or how to pay for it.

We’ll kick that issue around in an upcoming post.

 

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