Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon, is speaking Thursday night at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism about the future of communication.He picked a good time, considering the future of internet content is very much up in the air following an apellate court’s ruling that the FCC has no authority to enforce net neutrality.
The ruling means that internet service providers — take Verizon, for instance — have the right to throttle back bandwidth on competitors’ content. There’s no indication that anyone is doing that now, but the possibility worries the wide swath of Hollywood content creators who aren’t already locked into partnerships with ISPs.
No telling whether Seidenberg plans to directly address the 800-pound gorilla, but here’s guessing he’ll have to. Seidenberg declined a request to talk about the issue with TheWrap before Thursday night’s event.
The planned topic, according to the USC press release, is "how the network of 2020 will deliver personalized content to you when you want it and where you want it. Will the world of ‘broadcast push’ networks evolve into a world of ‘subscriber pull’ networks?"
If you’d like to watch Seidenberg’s talk, check back at the Wrap at 6 p.m. (Pacific) — USC plans to stream the event live, and we’ve got it here (see the embedded video player below).
When it’s all over, we’ll update with a link to the discussion on YouTube.
