So I’ve been following the Network Neutrality debate pretty closely hoping that for once Congress could/would manage to look at technology in a way that didn’t involve buying into whatever weird logic (RIAA suing customers) the corporations brought to the debate. I’m happy to report that so far the government appears to be siding with the consumers. For those of you not familiar (all 2 of you) with the current Network Neutrality debate it basically goes like this: The bandwidth providers want to charge certain bandwidth users extra money if they use a lot of bandwidth or bandwidth of a certain type.
What it really boils down to is the fact that much like the RIAA or MPAA instead of joining WITH the companies using this bandwidth to offer amazing new technology and applications is the Telco’s want to get continually paid for upgrades they’d already planned to do that will make their backbones cheaper in the longrun.
For those of you in the Pacific Northwest you’re familiar with this business model thanks to Starbucks founder Howard Shultz. Shultz demanded that Seattle taxpayers pay for a new arena for the Sonics or he’d move the team. Apparently the sports team economics of “taxpayer money subsidizes my massively profitable business so I can then charge taxpayers more for tickets” is now being examined by the Telcos.
Why should Comcast or Verizon spend money to increase their profitability when they can just have the consumers pay for the upgrades?
On the one hand the corporate arguments do make a little bit of sense: Some internet companies are using massive amounts of bandwidth (YouTube, Google Video etc) but they are free to consumers. However with a closer look we see that with Telcos being able to make companies pay to use bandwidth free sites like those mentioned above will likely go to a pay model and we’re suddenly right back where we were in the late 90’s.
This debate has brought together the far right and far left in totally new ways as well as given us the great bizarre quotes from PR hacks in the industry; like the Verizon Exec who implied that by charging high bandwidth users more money that small “garage” developers would have a greater ability to create that killer app. So a garage developer could make a “killer app” like basecamp or sidejobtrack that gets a massive amount of traffic and pay for it how exactly? With great traffic comes great bandwidth responsibility.
Get off it Telcos. If you don’t like your own business model get out of the business. Don’t shift your inability to want to part with a buck to consumers (i.e. anyone who pays you for your service) it is not our job to subsidize you. Corporations don’t deserve welfare (amtrak, airlines and subsidized farmers this includes you as well). Don’t let Congress allow the FCC to drop the ball on communications regulating yet again.
Related Posts
