In the interest of advancing the discussion of the broadband future beyond the industry's bullish pronouncements, here are five basic questions that will have to be addressed if the public interest is served in the broadband era:
1. Traffic Management: While it is necessary to arbitrate among competing claims on network resources, will some transport-management schemes artificially favor certain types of content or services at the expense of others (in order to gain a market advantage, for example). What happens to the principle of "common carriage" if the carriage in question grants premium service to some data while relegating others to third-class transit?
2. Screen Real-estate: Will menus and other navigational aids, including the placement of content on the screen and the prominence of certain links, be used in a discriminatory manner, favoring some programming over others? Will there be opportunities for users to select and/or customize their own start pages and hot lists?
3. Proprietary Content: Will the "branding" of content and services that has become increasingly common on the World Wide Web, in which various products and services are "bundled" according to their corporate affiliations (and content is cached locally to expedite delivery), serve to limit rather than expand our online options? How much incentive will users have to venture beyond corporate portals, and how much freedom will they have to go wherever they want in their online travels?
4. Inter-passivity: The illusion of participation that today's multimedia diversions often create has been aptly described as inter-passive, in contrast to more robust forms of recreation of the past (from sports to storytelling to song and dance). Will the impending era of "interactive television," marrying broadcast and digital technologies, pose similar illusions? In an environment in which even the broadest array of programmatic, promotional, and mercantile choices are in fact constrained by an intricate, if invisible, network of corporate alliances, is consumer choice itself an illusion?
5. The Set-Top Box: Often described as the most valuable square foot of real-estate in the world, the set-top box is about to become even more valuable in the broadband era, as the centerpiece of a new system of interactive television, e-commerce, and Internet services. And yet the set-top is also largely a black box, seemingly beyond the control of Washington to regulate and certainly beyond the ability of most consumers to understand. Can we afford to cede so much control to network operators, who, literally left to their own devices, will transform the intelligent set-top box into a vending machine for proprietary content and closely monitored transactions?