TV needs its flame-throwing debates. Politics lives off its one-liners. And human nature seeks the cozy confines of neat labels, clean boarders, and bright lines.
But life doesn’t work that way. And neither does the Internet Ecosystem.
A point made on this blog and elsewhere is that it helps to view all the players in the Internet space as entwined entities, whose success and failure impact seemingly distant players.
That all players, big and small, play vital roles.
That said, labels often don’t fit nicely in this space, and players can be business partners, competitors, allies, and “frenemies” – all at the same time!
You know them, they exist all around the Internet Ecosystem, and it’s somewhat futile to put labels on any of their relationships.
Same applies to policy issues. Labels can often trip you up and distract from real issues – and their resolution.
For example, on CNBC this past Tuesday I was half-watching Carol Bartz, Yahoo!’s CEO mix it up as a guest host and interacting with a panel (see video below). She was providing the television audience with a good dose of sage wisdom at the machine-gunners pace TV demands.
The topic was the FCC’s national broadband plan and the government’s role in assisting broadband deployment. I caught her saying “the government should stay out of it” and, thinking others would find that point interesting, tweeted about it. I added the hashtag #NN because, in my mind, those following and searching net neutrality would find her comment relevant.
Like life, like the Internet Ecosystem, it was not that simple.
In fact, she wasn’t asked specifically about net neutrality, as I may have implied. The sharp eye of a GigaOm blogger caught that and decided to flesh out her view in a post she titled “Yahoo’s Carol Bartz Hates Net Neutrality? Nope.”
Well again, like life, the Internet Ecosystem is not that simple.
People (and companies) can label themselves any way they’d like, and I’m not trying to pigeonhole anyone. Journalism may need two sides and two distinct team uniforms, but here again, the Ecosystem rarely cooperates.
If you read what Carol Bartz said in her letter to the FCC on January 21, 2010 to Julius Genochowski, FCC Chairman. you see not a harsh partisan pointing fingers, but just an Internet leader trying to find common ground on a tough issue. Read it in full, but here are what I saw as her label-defying attempts to advance the Internet Ecosystem (emphasis mine):
We recognize that the question of "net neutrality" has sparked contentious debate, and that the term means different things to different people. But we believe there is increasing common ground in this debate, and that most stakeholders understand the benefits of protecting a level playing field for all online products, so that users can gain access to the widest set of choices possible, and entrepreneurs can find an audience for new, untested, but potentially exciting products, while ensuring that broadband providers can manage their networks and grow their businesses.
It is important to acknowledge that broadband providers are now spending literally billions of dollars to expand and upgrade systems so that more and more people can get onto the Internet with better quality and faster speeds - a process that is critical to the future expansion and enjoyment of the Internet. These broadband providers, understandably, have a reasonable expectation that they will be allowed to do what needs to be done to ensure a good experience for their users - whether that is fighting spam, avoiding traffic congestion that negatively impacts the network, assisting law enforcement or fighting malicious attacks on the infrastructure. And there are certainly other potential areas, such as the offering of proprietary services by those networks, that should be considered in crafting workable regulation in this area.
Like I said, read the whole letter. You will bear witness to, much like the Verizon-Google joint filing, the Internet Ecosystem trying to find solutions. Labels be damned!