There wasn't much new ground broken in the hyped debate between Google's Vint Cerf, "co-father of the Internet" and Dave Farber, Cerf's former Professor and thus a "grandfather of the Internet."
What I found most interesting was Mr. Cerf's focus in the debate on the the CLEC experience after the 1996 Telecom Act and his emphasis that there is still not enough last mile competition.
I should have made the connection before, but his experience at MCI, one of the largest failed CLECs, must have been highly formative for him before he moved to Google. It sounded to me that Mr. Cerf sees NN as partly re-fighting the whole CLEC-unbundling issue -- or righting what he believes as a past wrong. It also sounded to me that his head is still in an intra-modal re-seller competition mindset and that he is not a believer in emerging inter-modal competition -- despite the evidence.
This explains why broadband providers have such a viscerally negative reaction to NN today. Many key Neutrality-ites are trying to re-fight the CLEC debacle, one of the most destructive and counter-productive attempts by the government to micromanage the market in recent memory.
It also explains why Snowe Dorgan is drafted as a clone of the CLEC unbundling language in Section 251 of the Telecom Act. It isn't about free speech or consumers, its about trying to manage wholesale competition like FCC Chairman Hundt tried disastrously in the mid 1990's. Ugh.
