The EU commission announced yesterday that they will investigate whether the internet providers collaboration is a case of an illegal trust. While it is too early to draw conclusions about the outcome, it is a welcome development that an arm of government looks into the field of online competition. The internet is a network of cables owned and operated by all kinds of different organisations. We tend to think about it as a commercial project, but in fact large proportions of the infrastructure are partly or wholly owned by the government, on the national and/or local levels. Other parts are owned by academic institutions, research institutes and universities. The basic research on the technology for the internet was made by the US military in the Sixties and Seventies, the first applications were by universities in the Seventies and Eighties, the world wide web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN particle laboratory (which is funded by the EU member states). So the commercial internet service as we know it is actually a fairly recent development. The internet therefore belongs to everybody, not the telecom companies. That makes a democratic responsibility to regulate it, anti-trust is a good place to start.
