Vint Cerf, the man who developed the technical principles on which the internet works, has come out swinging at telephone and cable companies over their attempts to arbitrarily control the infrastructure. "Basically, it's like little kids in a tantrum: 'I'm not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony,'" he said in a video posted on the blog on Tuesday. "My reaction to this is quite negative. It's harmful to the national interest to behave in this way because it is serious infrastructure — it's very much like the road ways." The debate has raged on in Canada this year as phone giant Bell has employed bandwidth throttling techniques that have caught the attention of smaller ISPs who buy capacity from them. "We have to provide incentives that cause those companies to behave differently or create an incentive for a competitor to put in facilities that will compete with them. I want to take away their monopoly mandate," Cerf said. "We have to make it a privilege to build the infrastructure. There has to be a reasonable rate of return, but it cannot be a confiscatory rate of return and it cannot be abused by allowing people to throttle competitors." Vint Cerf now works for Google as senior vice-president. CBC Story here.
