SES Chicgo  Day Three  Keynote address

David Isenberg and Kevin Ryan

Five reasons why SEM (Search Engine Marketers) need a Neutral Net:

5. Extra charges

4. Reduced reach

3. Degraded knowledge of customer behavior

2. Reduced marketing and application discovery

1. Reduced trust

“The Phone Company is the Enemy of the Neutral (free) Internet (’net).

Ed Whitabek, CEO AT&T said “No one will use our pipes for free!  If Google and Yahoo! do, they’re nuts.”

The Internet is planned for reliability, it does not have just a single purpose, and it continues to grow.

The phone companies say “the sky is falling,” the Net is degrading.  Actually, it’s getting better all the time!

Net Neutrality means the same treatment of every “packet” of data regardless of who is sending it, why, or to whom.

Because of Net Neutrality we have: email, blogging, video and audio streaming, Web 2.0 applications, and on and on.

Actually, the Net is not free, because most of us pay an ISP $ for our Internet connection, it’s just that it’s worth far more than what we are being charged, so the phone companies really just want to charge us more – much more.

[There's that profit motive again!]

What if you had NO Internet access tomorrow?  How much would you be willing to pay to get it back – how soon would you need it to do your work?  (If I don’t have 24/7 connectivity, obviously this blog would look strangely familiar every time that you visited and your email/RSS feeds would stop.  I also would stop returning your emails – I wouldn’t be able to, I mean.

“Public Calling” – 800 years ago it was mandated: competent services (e.g. shoe maker), available to all, for a fair price – NOT “whatever the market will pay.”  Hmmmm

So whether you are a Free Marketer or not, the “free” Internet is threatened.  (Mobile is a different animal.)

Let me try to sum up this Keynote address:  “If Network Neutrality dies, you’re screwed!”
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.