The problem with companies who have built their business around free is that it is far from free to remain successful. The more success you have in delivering free, the more expensive it is to stay at the top. The more success you have, the more important it is to management to remain successful.  The more important remaining successful is to management, the more money they will spend, the more chances they will take, the more infrastructure they will build, the more people they will hire.  All of the things that will prevent them from staying lean , mean and flexible. All of the things that distract them from innovating within their core competency.

I love this on going discussion. Of course all of you who think that the OPEN internet will be the primary platform for the delivery of traditional tv content are wrong . But hey, thats what makes a market. Before I get into dismissing some of the traditional arguments why Online TV will take over, let me start you with one that hasn’t been used. Rural Broadband.

Washington - The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday charged Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and founder of HDNet, with insider trading over shares in a company called Mamma.com he sold in 2004. The SEC says Cuban improperly sold his 600,000 shares in Mamma.com after being informed by its CEO in a confidential manner of a transaction that would devalue his shares.

Boston - CitySquares.com, a provider of hyper-local search services in the Northeast U.S., announced on Wednesday that it ahs received an undisclosed amount of new funding from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, and Jonathan Kraft, of the Kraft Group.

The Motion Picture Association of America is doing their best to follow in the footsteps of their brethren at the RIAA and make business harder for its members. They, Im guessing at the direction of some lawyers of their member companies, want to try to make cable and satellite companies shut off the "analog hole" when showing movies that are being released to TV prior to their DVD release. In the MPAA's own words "Distribution over insecure outputs would facilitate the illegal copying and redistribution of this high value content, causing untold damage to the DVD and other 'downstream' markets."

I ordered a MacBook Air site unseen. That's a first for me. As I write this I'm about to go workout and it dawns on me that I'm on my 3rd generation of Apple IPod. I started with the original, switched to a bigger version (to back up all my pics and show off my kids to my friends) and then for the holidays, got myself and wife an iTouch.

As inevitable as the Mitchell Report response was, how long will it be before we get the headline: "Popeye denies he knew spinach was a performance enhancing drug". "I had no idea. I was just eating my vegetables. It was supposed to make me stronger. It was what, 30 or more years ago ? How much did we really know about the properties of spinach back then ? Why is the media making such a big deal out of this ? I didn't know then and I am paying the price today.

I love the feedback on my position on P2P traffic. The well thought out "You Suck", " Or "the internet isnt that way", or "The ISP is selling me 10mbs, I can use it anyway I want" Guess what, business models do evolve over time. You may want your ISP to be exactly how you want it to be. You may read into your experience with them anything you want. But it can and will change if the economics don't work for them. No amount of whining about "what the internet is supposed to be" will change any of that.