I was working at Time Warner for the Road Runner cable modem launch in my franchise area, and I thought it would lead to all sorts of people hosting their own servers, etc. Bandwidth down to the customer was 10mbit, upload was 1mbit, or something like that – nobody asked about upload, which I was sure was not enough. After some months of that, usage reflected that priority. Most people downloaded all the time. Somewhere less than 1% out of about 50,000 customers served data from their machines.

This was pre-Facebook, pre-platform, so around 1999-2002 ish. That’s a low percentage, though still a significant number of people that otherwise might not have had a way to publish.

In my opinion, to achieve the level of abundance that allowed technology innovators to create things like VisiCalc in the past, something much different is needed than the current vision of home broadband.

In general, the control that modern technology provides over who can produce things versus who can consume them needs to be addressed. In particular, to create the abundance needed for innovation, everyone needs to have the open connectivity to be a producer as well as a consumer.

What can be done so the address limitations of IPv4 to go away and all home Internet services to run at the same speed in both directions?

How about a marketing rule that between the available upstream and downstream speeds an ISP can only advertise the slowest of the two?

Should there be a rule about sustained bandwidth versus burst rates? Over how many hours should sustained bandwidth be measured?

Maybe speculation about all the good things that will happen from open connectivity is a bit dangerous without any technical details about what kind of open connectivity would promote those goals.