Craig Birkmaier wrote: > The question is not whether these investments will be made, but > rather, can advantaged businesses or others with deep pockets > use these investments to maintain or gain control of yet another > critical oligopoly service. It was always true that those with deep pockets can distribute more and better, over the Internet, Craig. A neutral Internet is a great innovation, for consumers. In the old days, the only way to get a lot of bandwidth to individual homes was to build a proprietary walled garden. And the infrastructure had to be set up for one-way-only broadcast. This put the infrastructure owner in complete control of content selection, pricing, and so on. The Internet is a bit like the old two-way telephone network on steroids. The infrastructure owner is no longer in control of the content being carried. So okay, that alone is a huge improvement. And the speed now possible, with this new two-way infrastructure, makes content delivery that was previously only feasible over the one-way walled garden, also feasible over this two-way unwalled medium. So, what you called "cannibalizing the MVPD business model" is very much like the airline industry "cannibalizing" the stagecoach and railroad business models. Stuff happens. Of course, those with deep pockets will be better able to deploy content on the Internet (see also the IETF draft document I sent). Everything costs money. The huge difference is, there can be any number of such deep pockets, sharing the same Internet, as long as the Internet remains neutral. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.