The worst of the «Valuation Alierta» that the Spanish presidency proposes for the EU

It does already slightly more than one month we were afraid the worst thing regarding the plans of the Spanish presidency of the EU for Internet.

From this day diverse events have raised again the alerts of all that we defend a neutral network as the only route to support a network and a free and plural digital society. I refer, the reader avezado will have already foreseen it although we had no time in this blog to speak before it, to the sad declarations of César Alierta, president of phone companhy, regarding porqué the companies that are employed at the network should pay a valuation to them. [Without it serving as precedent, here below I leave the video - with annotations that facilitate his comprehension, I dress in shot off Pull it does a pair of days - so that it is seen by the interested parties who do not know about what this gentleman said.]

That the Spanish State proposes now to raise this valuation Alierta to the whole EU (the proposal has been known now, but it was moved a few days before the famous declarations of Alierta, Bandaancha) it was an awaited movement, every time the proper minister of industry had already defended it in a few criticized declarations in which he was attacking the neutrality of the network himself.

Although I coincide with Antonio with that is terrible that the biggest company of telecommunications of the world latoc is unable to do a proposal of value of future towards the network, the most deplorable thing of everything it is not that Phone companhy does not understand that it is the network the one that contributes value to his services and not the other way round (as the people use the meter because it has work, and not the other way round that the people have work because they come in meter), the most painful thing is to see how the State fights on the ISP in an alliance for the control of the network.

It has been years since the access providers court the State, in his struggle with the management entities for sees who has the last power to control the flow of information and contents and, this way, to see who has the control on the taximeter of our life in network. The State accepts the dealing because an alliance with the doors of entry to the network facilitates the record of the telecommunications, necessary to increase the information asymmetry in the times of the transparent citizenship.

We were saying in June, 2008, to the thread of The end of the flat rates.

the Internet traffic represents an increasing portion of the entire traffic of telecommunications, but the telecos do most of his benefits across the traditional services (calls of voice) do not include you in the damned flat rates that do that his benefit is not burglaryable and that, therefore, this traffic increase does not bear a proportional increase of the costs.

The political power contemplates this request as an opportunity to allow the leaked one of contents, which it would demolish to the neutrality of the network. So that it is not ruffled to think that some and others should wink an eye and should legislate on this matter.

Any big Teleco as telephone it generates many more income and more benefits than other companies as Google. Nevertheless, if the medium-term perspective is that the benefits do not climb of progressive form, his stock-exchange capitalization will not go off (something that if it happens to the big one G and to other Internet companies). That's why Telephone search to break what flatly the access tariffs have, to turn them into a segmented product and segmentable, with aptitude to grow exponentially (or that at least such a thing could be said in a powerpoint to sell the motorbike). Very feasible I do not see that a company without ideas of future and that still contandocon the biggest monopoly and the biggest facility that the State could give to a teleco has been unable to adapt itself to be right for with Internet. So yes: they will use his forces in taking the roll from other instead of in making its own bread, and quite because his lean income without margin of worn growth will not manage to shoot his value in bag: into the speculation we have run.

And the problem here is not that Phone companhy, the State, Google, and the SGAE they all try to break the neutrality of the network (good, Google only tries to supplant it: je!) in his favor: the problem is that we are alone once again. Nobody will defend us but we. And in this battle we are not on behalf of anybody - little imports for me that the cat takes to the water Alierta, the State, the SGAE or a linear combination of all the previous ones - any more than of ours, because nobody is on our part.

And perhaps there is going to come the moment in which we should go thinking of gaining access straight to the network, of autonomous form. Perhaps it is not a feasible large-scale today, but they are not that far and there is no other one if we want to balance a situation in which the absence of restraint of the state - managerial concentrated elite begins to result... irritating and dangerous for all.