Nabobs Need a Neutral Net
October 22, 2009
The lobbying on the overhyped net neutrality issue steamed up yesterday when the most famous members of 20 venture capital firms (and a couple of CEOs of well-known tech companies) sent a letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. They claimed that “open markets for internet content drive investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation,” and that allowing network operators to “control the applications market by favoring certain kinds of content would endanger innovation and investment in an investment sector which represents many billions of dollars in economic activity.” Sounds reasonable.
The signatory parties included VC bigwigs such as Tim Draper from DFJ, John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia’s Mike Moritz. Their letter followed a similar one sent to Genachowski on Monday by the CEOs and founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the rest. The lobbying from the VC and tech communities was in response to the apparent barrage of letters the FCC received from network operators and other net neutrality opponents last week.
It seems that staying net neutral is the utilitarian thing to do, but I am not familiar enough with the views of opponents to properly deconstruct the issue. That will have to wait until next week.