On the eve of the 2009 CES show, perhaps it’s time for a few more thoughts on what should prove to be The Big Story at this year’s show: televisions and set-top boxes with internet access baked in, for direct internet video access.

For the last few years, numerous companies in the ‘computer’ business (on either the hardware or software side) have made repeated attempts to market solutions involving the PC as a viable long-form internet video delivery platform - with little to no success. Lately, though, perhaps enough anthropologists and/or behavioral scientists have been hired to finally convince at least a few of these companies that despite all the bells and whistles, a computer might never be a television after all (as they say in the south, “you can put a brick in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit”).

So while certain companies might have enjoyed a substantial technological head start in internet video, through a stubborn insistence on leveraging the home computer, the opportunity was missed. But no matter: here comes the CE industry - as of Thursday in Las Vegas, it’s their market now.

Apple undertook a conscious expansion into the CE industry several years ago with the iPod (in fact, dropping ‘Computer’ from their corporate name) - is it too late for other computer-centric companies to make a similar move? 

The recent Intel/Yahoo initiative is a particularly interesting case in point.  Both companies, as Yahoo Connected TV vice president Patrick Barry poetically puts it, “emerged from the ocean of the PC”.

Intel Intel has been especially forward-thinking regarding the convergence of the home computing and consumer electronics industries for some time now, having launched the Intel Digital Home Group several years ago.  The Digital Home Group, active in both processor design and standards development, is particularly close to my heart, as it’s made up of both anthropologists as well as computer scientists.

Yahoo We’ve been pretty hard on Yahoo lately, but they do have some heavy OEM hitters lined up to implement their embedded internet TV ‘widgets’ system: Sony, TiVo, and Samsung. Also worth noting, the Connected TV initiative intends to follow a purely advertising-supported model, and studies routinely show consumers prefer advertising to subscription fees.  Lastly, yet another issue (and one that holds true for all internet video contenders) is the remote: as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently noted, a Nintendo Wii-like pointing remote will likely be required as internet-enabled television hardware matures.

At any rate, given their recent setbacks, expect Yahoo to bet the farm on this one.

“You think we need this phone anymore?” I asked my wife.  Although I’d retired ye olde twisted copper line a few years back, going that one step further and losing the VOIP phone - well, that felt a little reckless.  But the fact remained that aside from a weekly call to my wife’s family in Germany, our use usage of that line had dwindled down to getting the occasional cold call for donations from the Police Benevolent Association of New York City (where I hadn’t lived for several years).

Live Simple.  Lean and Mean. (or our pale bourgeois version of it, at least) - to us, it seemed like a good idea at the time.   It turns out we weren’t alone: a recent US government survey claims that 17.5% (or 1 in 6) US households now depend exclusively on cellular networks for telephone service.

Nevertheless, I’ve found these major home network revisions require (ahem) particularly well documented key stakeholder buy-in, so I waited a week or two and asked Anja once again if Skype could be a workable Vonage replacement for her calls home.  Only after getting further assurance did I finally make the ‘Dear John’ call to break it off with Vonage (at one point, to spare the call center operator from having to go through his whole customer retention script with me, I think I might have actually said “it’s not you, it’s me”).

As it happened, though, both Anja and I came to rue that fateful day: my comeuppance coincided with a switch to the iPhone – or should I say to the remarkably dismal (in the NYC metro area at least) AT&T voice network that comes tethered to it like a ball and chain.  For her, it turned out she hated having to either boot up the laptop and run Skype or try to cradle a tiny cell phone on her shoulder during those leisurely Sunday morning calls home to Germany after all…

She’s one resourceful e-shopper, though, and soon came across what I think could be the Next Cool Geek Accessory – the retro cell phone handset. While she uses hers only at home for purely ergonomic reasons, I can imagine these things starting to turn up on the streets of the Williamsburg (and other ghettos of hip) in 2009, just as black horn rim glasses did 10 years ago.  For the rest of us (those of us old enough to remember), making a call with these huge ancient headsets is somehow strangely reassuring.

Yep. I like this thing - both for the sheer comfort and clunkiness of it, as well as for the juxtaposition of vintage design and current technology - there are even Bluetooth and USB versions available.

Who knows, if my AT&T voice coverage ever improves enough to make it worthwhile, I might just get a Bluetooth handset for my iPhone…

Net Neutrality.  Up to now, the conventional definition of the concept has been that internet service providers shall be prohibited from “blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies” (as quoted from a recent NetworkWorld article).  Arguably, the definitive infraction against this particular notion of Net Neutrality was Comcast’s recent ‘managing’ of Bit Torrent traffic via the insertion of spurious connection reset packets.

However, the whole issue the issue of Net Neutrality (at the last mile between the ISP and the consumer, at least) is rapidly becoming a moot point: in preparation for the expected explosion of demand for longer-form video over IP, most major carriers are now scrambling to assemble and/or acquire proprietary content delivery networks (CDN)s to avoid the ever more congested and unpredictable system of routers out there in the public cloud (a recent post about just what Google, Microsoft, and Verizon are up to can be found here).

So while your neighborhood ISP might maintain a commitment to Net Neutrality itself, the real action is well upstream, as major corporations join already established CDN players such as Akamai, Edge Networks, and Yahoo’s Cloudfront to distribute and/or cache digital media content out along the edge of the cloud, in effect forming competing private mini-clouds to minimize the role of the public internet itself.

Put another way, in the purest sense of the term, Net Neutrality has already become something of an anachronism – not due to any localized slowing down of unfavored packets at the ISP level, but due to a globalized speeding up of favored packets on CDNs, before they ever reach the ISP.   A recent Wall Street Journal article touches on just this nuanced distinction: according to Google, their recent proprietary internet/CDN initiatives “do not rely on the carrier’s unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent“ - and even the independent public interest organization Public Knowledge (whose directors include internet academic and Obama advisor Lawrence Lessig) now maintains that “caching in no way is a part of the Net Neutrality issue.”

I’m of the opinion there’s considerably more gray area here.  But no matter - since the public internet will simply not scale to meet the anticipated bandwidth demand once short-tail (mainstream) premium digital media over IP becomes widespread, both carriers and content owners will increasingly invest in proprietary content delivery networks - and as consumers buy into the mass-market internet video offerings made possible by these high-performance CDNs, the very concept of Net Neutrality will seem increasingly quaint - and the “internet” as a whole will come to resemble the American health care system: multi-tiered and largely privatized.

So to the extent long-form video over IP ultimately enjoys widespread mass-market success,  the innocent ideal of a truly egalitarian and fundamentally neutral internet is destined to end, no matter what your local ISP’s policies are.

Don’t shoot the messenger…  

Last week, I quipped about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

The more I think about this though, the new presidential over-the-top social viral video strategy brings up some interesting questions:

For starters, as the new administration is keen to leverage the benefits of ubiquitous online video distribution, what keeps the public from possible Obama video fatigue? 

As of today, we are in week five of the elect-president’s weekly video address and already audiences are dropping off faster than a second rate soap opera could on broadcast TV.

As of writing this post, the new administration’s first video address posted to YouTube on November 15 generated 247,600 average weekly video streams.

However, for Mr. Obama’s more recent weekly messages, viewer attention declined noticeably.

Videos published to YouTube in week three and two generated only 174,805 and 115,106 streams respectively - that’s as much as 46% fewer streams delivered compared to Mr. Obama’s first weekly video address.

But then again, last week’s video addressed the nation’s pressing issue of steadily raising job losses, as a result garnering a record 445,613 streams in only seven days. 

Clearly, subject matter matters as audiences have an acute understanding of what they deem important enough to log on, view, and listen repeatedly. 

The other thought I had, the idea of a regular viral presidential video address will capture eyeballs and minds not just among US audiences, but also around the rest of the connected globe.

By design in and outside of YouTube, Web video by nature is shared freely and abundantly. Mr. Obama’s taped messages make no exception.

Thus, from East to West, North and South, the first of these weekly video messages are likely spreading globally and virally as we speak.

Does that mean Germany’s Chancelor Angela Merkel will soon start her own weekly video campaign?

Are any regular video posts forthcoming from the heads of state in France, the UK, Iran, or Iraq?; prepared to deal with the resulting online feedback of citizens everywhere chiming in?

Interestingly, as little as ten years ago all of this would have been unimaginable.

YouTube and its ample offspring of amateur video snack sites simply didnt exist. Neither did the prerequisite broadband lines, nor PCs with processors fast enough to make Web video fun.

Fast forward, in one swoop the US presidential web video address legitimizes how far we have come in democratizing media in the past years.  

This one’s for the history books.

Rather than trying to avoid (undesireable) discourse and debate, the new White House resident seems to signal honest interest in point-to-point dialogue versus the age-old hub-and-spoke system of commercial journalism. 

The question remains whether the idea of open viral dialog can help jointly create something better down the road. 

Or is the Web’s innate capability of cheap and ubiquitous distribution to and by all merely a zero-sum game?

Well, history books might tell.

This doesn’t happen every day.

Rene Obermann, the Deutsche Telekom CEO himself, just pinged me, inviting me to connect to his LinkedIn profile. 

Now, two things came to mind instantly: Who else at DT got pinged? And why so late at night?

As to the former, it seems fair to assume the same invite went out to 200,000 or so of my other Deutsche Telekom colleagues around the globe.  (Because, although a Deutsche Telekom employee, I am certainly not close enough to Mr. Obermann to qualify for a personal one-on-one invite to his social network. More about this later).

As to why so late at night, myself in New York right now, my Blackberry took notice of the invite to connect to Mr. Obermann at a surprisingly late 10:43 PM EST.

Which means someone in Germany - where DT’s HQ resides - got up rather bright and early (4:43 AM to be exact), to get this out to me.

So what does this all mean?

A)  No doubt, when the top executive of a multi-national company pings you via LinkedIn, you know Web-based social networking has hit mainstream.

That’s a good thing I suppose. (Even when you know, it is his PR team that drives the initiative).

B) Driving traffic worth 200,000 individuals (at least potentially) towards a single social network doesn’t happen every day. Not even at such a popular site as LinkedIn has become.

On balance though, I don’t think they’ll mind.

C) My guess is more messages will be forthcoming from my CEO; presumably all via internal PR, all DT-related I suppose, and designed to induce informal dialog, outside corporate walls and a T-branded environment.

Whether this is going to work, let’s see. But I am certainly smitten by this new openness permeating not just inside DT’s CEO office, but in many other places these days.

Then I got really curious.

What if all the CEO’s of other leading European telecom giants have long been on LinkedIn, and I just didn’t know.

Could Rene be late in this, merely following and not leading his peers into the nebula of Web 2.0 ?

Well, turns out, France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard himself is currently not on LinkedIn. But the company maintains a corporate profile, so far with 556 FT employees auto-grouped by LinkedIn under the corporate umbrella.

Telecom Italia Franco Bernabe is indeed on LinkedIn, but so far with zero connections. What went wrong there?

Then there is BT CEO Ben Verwaayen. Yes, Ben does maintain his personal LinkedIn profile. Even better (little did I know), we are only two degrees removed. 

Tuns out, his profile page only shows a single connection so far. And the one connection separating Ben and I is someone with 500+ connections. Hardly a quality contact, I suppose.

And how about closer to (my) home, the US? Are the leading US telco CEOs populating LinkedIn?

As of my writing these lines, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is curently not present with a profile.

Neither is Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg. 

Either they (and their PR team) haven’t gotten to it, I am thinking, or they (and their PR team) found it simply not worth their while. Who knows?

Backt to Rene Obermann, unlike his LinkedIn telco CEO peers, he publicly distributes a Gmail address, and has set his profile to allow insight into who else is connecting to him at any time.

This seems to signal a level of engagement interests way above and beyond his telco CEO peers.

But upon my last check (12:03 AM EST), his public LinkedIn profile shows a mere eight connections.

While not overly impressive, heed the time difference, folks. I suppose most of my colleagues haven’t had a chance to accept the invite as they have literally yet to wake up to their CEO’s surprisingly early morning ping.

The groundswell of interest in finally getting internet video over to the television in such a way that avoids the clunky computer-centric workarounds we’ve seen to date is picking up steam - just in time for next month’s CES show.

While this is much as we expected, a more surprising (and related) development is the resilient strength in game console sales:

• As of October, the video game industry is up 18% year-over-year, and remains on track for a record year.
• Microsoft reports November was its biggest xBox month ever in Europe, with sales up 124% over last November.
• According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, more than half of American adults play video games, and 20% play every day.  More importantly (because after all, this is the future we’re talking about here), a full 81% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 are home video gamers.  And the gender gap is less than one would think: while 55% of adult males play, surprisingly, 50%of adult females report playing as well.

Needless to say, given the current economic climate, numbers like these are quite impressive – and suggest the game console could be a much more viable solution to that pesky internet video ‘last yard’ problem than previously thought.  With that, a brief overview of the three competing platforms:

Sony Due to an ongoing price war, Sony now loses money on each PS3 it sells, according to Macquarie Securities analyst David Gibson.  However, the company is firmly committed to the PS3 as an integral part of their long-term internet video strategy, and just rolled out a newly revamped Playstation Network direct video download service for the PS3.  What’s unique about the PS3?  Sony is able to leverage its unique position as both a CE manufacturer and a major film studio, and recently made Sony Pictures’ summer Will Smith vehicle ‘Hancock’ available via download prior to the DVD release.

Microsoft The complex and expensive prospect of upgrading the home PC to Vista Premium or Ultimate just to get internet video to the television has unsurprisingly proven less than compelling to most consumers.  In contrast, over the recent Thanksgiving weekend Microsoft reports a 25 percent increase over last year’s already robust sales of 310,000 xBox units - in short, it’s clear where the growth is.  Like Sony, Microsoft has a direct video download service for their game console (and like the Playstation Network, the xBox Live Marketplace offers a large number of titles in HD).  What’s unique about the xBox 360?  The Microsoft download library is larger than the recently launched Sony service’s, and in addition, the xBox can now also stream content from your Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ queue (in other words, but an xBox, get Roku functionality for free).  While (like Roku) titles must be added to the queue from the Netflix website, the ability to both stream and download (and the better selection for both) gives the xBox an edge over the PS3 in terms of internet video functionality.

Nintendo Here we have a bit of a wild card.  Thanks to their groundbreaking motion-sensing remote control (and a unique selection of games made possible by it), the Nintendo Wii is the market leading game console in the US, selling 34.6 million units for 2008 Q3 (compared to 16.8 million for the PS3 and 22.5 for the xBox).  The company has been remarkably circumspect regarding its plans for internet video, though – so look for some kind of announcement shortly, perhaps at CES in January.  What’s unique about the Wii?  With no hard drive, any internet video solution would be streaming-based – which is just as well, since the Wii has only 480p (DVD) resolution anyway (although it’s worth noting that real-world demand for HD video has proven surprisingly low).   But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Wii is the motion sensing remote – as user interfaces get more advanced to support direct internet video access from the TV, we expect this point-and-click technology to replace the cluttered button-filled remotes of today.

Who knows, Apple TV and Vudu have certainly gotten a lot of things right, but neither has yet made a meaningful impact on the market – perhaps the Trojan Horse of online mutli-player video gaming will be just the added value proposition needed to make for a compelling ‘Last Yard’ solution.

OK. I admit. I am pretty psyched about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

Psyched because it seems much more than a simple “move-over-radio” battle cry; more than just postulating the World Wide Web as the latest of many presidential (one-way) bullhorns available.

For one, the “YouTube”-ization of the weekly Democratic radio address means that a rather arcane political messaging system is coming of age.

In other words, the good old weekly radio address (finally) preps to going (legitimately) video and viral and social, in the same way as anyone’s video blog out there could.

In a way (unknowingly) echoing this season’s ABC and NBC marketing slogans, Barack Obama and team invite us to “start here” and “chime in” - but this time outside the very TV broadcasting system that for so long determined what we would see, when, and for how long.

It is certainly nothing new that a publicly elected official is unafraid to engage in a form of political messaging that - once out the door - is no longer in his control.

That’s how traditional TV (or radio and print media for that matter), works. In this the Web is no different.

But it is major that aforementioned politician whole-heartedly embraces the collaborative Web and the truly conversational two-way nature of online video given that this is past his election campaign, and that he is none less than the next President of the United States going social on his entire constituency. 

Recently asked by CNN’s Sunday talk show host Fareed Zakaria about what advice if any he would give the incoming president, Al Gore’s response was simple: “Make more expository speeches. … [the] people are downloading”.

The presidential radio address as a viral video message for all to engage with plays right into that, ups the ante for you and me, the White House versus traditional media.

Let’s see if and how this will pan out.

Have you pinged the president-elect lately?

Picking up spyware or a virus/worm/trojan used to require some conscious action on the part of the user:  opening an email attachment, installing supposedly ‘necessary’ system software (video codecs were a common ploy), or downloading media and/or applications of questionable origin.

These days, Bad Things can occur much more transparently: the most rapidly growing method of spreading malware today is via compromised websites – so now, rather than having to (one way or another) make the explicit decision to ‘invite the bytes’ onto your machine, merely visiting a malicious (or unknowingly compromised) site can launch an exploit.  And since this new type of ‘drive-by’ attack is often implemented through 3rd-party browser plug-ins (such as Flash and Acrobat Reader) or via good old fashioned Javascript, it’s not just a Windows or Internet Explorer issue anymore (for the first time, Apple recently issued a KnowledgeBase article advising users to start installing antivirus protection (although after the resulting flurry of unwanted publicity, the warning was removed from the Apple site 24 hours later).

Although the increase in web malware activity is dramatic, it’s been going on for some time now: a recent study found that during 2007 alone, the number of such attacks increased more than 500 percent.  And while this is bad enough news for the home user, it’s even more troublesome for the enterprise, as HTTP (port 80) is the often the only traffic left largely unrestricted on corporate firewalls.

One simple precaution?  Update, update, update.  To address Javascript engine vulnerabilities, update your browser religiously, regardless of which particular browser or operating system you’re using.   As for Acrobat Reader, resist the temptation to ignore those frequent messages about available updates: you might wonder just how much better a PDF can possibly be displayed, but these days, chances are good that the update has something to do with security – and the same goes for Flash.

You can check for any available updates for Acrobat Reader from the Help menu of the application itself, and to check your version of Flash, go here - the Adobe site will inspect your installation and let you know.

Granted, we’re not big Yahoo fans here at digitalmissive - at least not of Yahoo! Mail: recently, several years’ worth of email was lost from Andreas’ personal account, and since early 2007, the search function on mine started returning messages only from the last month or so.   Yahoo’s response to both issues was of the “Known-Issue,-Our-Engineers-Are-Aware-Of-It” variety, but both issues have remained unresolved over the past few months.

Concurrently (as you might have heard), things have gotten a bit bumpy around here economically lately - but for Yahoo the news has been even worse: in October, the company announced the intended layoff of 10% of their workforce by year’s end,  and after turning down a buyout offer from Microsoft earlier this year at $31 per share, today the company’s stock dipped below $10.

Perhaps to entice Microsoft to make another offer (and perhaps to avoid submitting himself to what would’ve been a memorably contentious 2009 shareholder’s meeting), in November CEO Jerry Yang agreed to step down once a replacement can be found.   But despite the imminent departure of the initial $31 offer’s main opponent, and despite Yahoo’s obvious (if somewhat humiliating) interest in winning back the software giant’s affections, Microsoft has not been enticed to return to the table with a reduced offer.

Most recently, Yahoo Senior VP Toby Coppel (head of operations in Europe and Canada) has announced his departure from the company as well (although Yahoo insists Coppel’s decision is unrelated to Yang’s departure and Microsoft’s lack of renewed interest).  While I was admittedly frustrated with Yahoo Mail, it is with no schadenfreude that I witness the company’s troubles - especially not for the 1000+ Yahoo employees to be let go by 2009.  But it is interesting to note that how well a company executes on the small stuff (such as the mail accounts of two guys from New York) often has a way of being predictive of its longer-term prospects.

It’s not clear whether Microsoft’s apparent disinterest in Yahoo is genuine or whether it’s a tactical stance given Yahoo’s continually weakening negotiating position – but either way, as unhappy as Yahoo shareholders must be these days, Microsoft owners should be showing Steve Ballmer the love for walking away at $31…

One of the most daunting technological challenges we face is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the bourgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming media, telecommuting, and cloud computing - and as internet video demand moves from short-form/long-tail/low quality content to long-form/short-tail/high quality content (i.e. from YouTube to Hulu to movies), internet video only becomes a larger and larger part of this equation.

Just a heads up: as of now, the public internet will cease to be able to meet bandwidth demand by 2012, according to an excellent study by research firm Nemertes (if you read just one of the external sources linked to from this blog, make it this one).  Citing independent research from the University of Calgary, the study finds that the three largest US content providers (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo) have already “built out dedicated infrastructures” in advance of just such as scenario - in Google’s case, as evidenced by their recent pursuit of ‘dark’ (unused) transcontinental fiber.

In short, a trend towards content providers “investing in technologies to accelerate traffic to their sites ahead of that on the regular Internet” over higher-performing paid or private “overlay” networks.  Put another way, the egalitarian net-neutral internet we of today will become just the lowest rung of a multi-tiered system composed of competing proprietary networks – nothing less than the commercialization albeit by technical necessity) of the internet.  “The oligarchy, in other words, is devolving into individual city-states” is how the Nemertes study puts it.

So that’s what’s up on the content provider side – what about the service provider?

It turns out ISP industry recognizes the trend as well, and moves are well underway.  Because they lack the resources of a Google or Microsoft to implement their own parallel physical internet backbone data links, proprietary  CDNs (content delivery networks) are the direction they’re going in instead.  What’s a CDN? Through both network optimization/caching software and the brute-force deployment of multiple content-caching servers placed at strategically positioned and geographically diverse locations along the edge of the internet, CDNs are networks designed to circumvent the increasingly messy core of the publicly routed internet to provide the higher bandwidth, lower latency and increased scalability required to meet the challenges of the future.  The third-party wholesale CDN market is relatively mature (industry leader Akamai now maintains over 34,000 servers located in 70 countries), but several large ISPs have recently opted to ‘roll their own’: in June 2008, AT&T announced it was building out a CDN of its own using  software licensed by several smaller firms (ExtendMedia, Qumu and Stratacache), and just last week at a conference, I was handed a press release from Verizon announcing a CDN partnership with UK CDN firm Velocix.

Why have two of the largest US carriers now decided to buck the outsourcing trend and create their own CDNs, especially during such challenging economic times?  There are several reasons:

• While most residential ISP customers are on (ostensibly) all-you-can-eat plans, CDN usage is metered – so while the ISP’s per-user revenue has remained largely static, their costs from the 3rd party CDNs they’re currently contracting with have been steadily going up.  This makes the prospect of cutting out the middleman increasingly attractive.
• On a technical level, the synergy of an integrated CDN/last mile solution offers potential performance advantages an external wholesaled CDN would have difficulty matching – and as the last mile becomes faster due to increased presence of fiber (i.e. FIOS) and/or Docsis3.0, the integration of the CDN with the last mile makes even more sense.
• To the extent an ISP is able to build a demonstrably better mousetrap on their own, the quality of that company’s proprietary CDN could well become a primary competitive differentiator driving subscription growth – especially if, as expected, long-form internet video usage continues to grow.
• Unlike AT&T, Verizon is planning to leverage the price/performance advantages of their new proprietary CDN on the content owner side as well, and has already contracted directly with Starz Entertainment to offer Starz content to Verizon customers (in this way, the in-house CDN could very well resuscitate the largely failed ‘walled-garden’ model).

Are 3rd party CDN wholesalers Akamai and Limelight losing sleep?  Probably not – deploying an effective CDN is an incredibly huge undertaking, and as such will be a realistic option only for the AT&Ts, and Verizons of the world.  But for the combined residential CDN/ISP, does being in both businesses concurrently present some interesting antitrust/conflict of interest issues?

Regardless of how it plays out between content providers’ pivate backbones and service providers’ private CDNs, what is clear is that the landscape will likely look profoundly different in five years – the internet as we know it could well become the equivalent of the public post office - while the equivalent of a parrallel  higher-performing ‘Fedex’ internet emerges, for the sole purpose of getting you that HD internet video stream or workplace desktop session you require.

On a purely technical level, it remains an exciting future – but will the incorporation of the internet (and the de facto end of net neutrality) happen at the expense of innovation?