[Politics/Tech/Profit] Ghost of Internet Future
Great absurdist dialogue here about a battle over the Internet. Basically telco and cable providers like Verizon and Comcast want to charge both subscribers and content providers for bandwidth. Basically this to me seems like biting the hand that feeds you as content providers are the ones who create demand for broadband, which consumers buy (at a pretty expensive rate) from the telcos. When big companies fight over stuff like this, we all lose. Whoever has the best lawyers and most lobbiest win, consumers lose (but believe they win), society takes another step back.
All hail the mighty dollar, destroyer of worlds, virtual and real.
2 comments:
I believe the proper pretag should be [Greed], although [Extortion] also seems pretty close to being on the nose.
Telcos have pissed away billions (where is my fibre-level broadband? I pay about $40 a month for 1.5 Megabit service when some asian countries have nearly 100 times faster connections) and now they want to create a tiered internet to increase their profits at the cost of an open infrastructure.
Have you noticed that more and more of the economy is businesses creating relationships with each other in order to conspire against their customers? It is like we don't even matter anymore.
I use Verizon as my wireless carrier, but if they succeed with this little scheme of theirs, I won't be their customer for long. Corporatist syndicates are trying to destroy everything in the name of next fiscal quarter's profits. The major search engines already pay for their broadband access (Google has 4 OC-48 lines and 4 OC-12 lines... OC-48 lines are what, $80,000 a MONTH?) End users already pay their ISPs and telcos for broadband. So this is about the telcos not coming up with a useful business model for their bandwidth and wanting to rewrite the rules of the internet to negotiate a percentage of other businesses. That's basically protection money and rackets. If I were Google, I'd sic the RICO act on them (oh wait, the FCC is obsolete and nearly useless...nevermind).
The internet works best when it is not just some corporatist extension of shopping malls and cable television. Computers should not be Pay Per View TV and the internet should not just be optimized shopping portals. The lawless sandbox with the very small cost of entry to free speech and press is why it was and will remain important.
Welcome back to the early '80s. Pay-per-use Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy. Those models worked oh-so-well once the Internet caught on. All it will take (hopefully) is one big ISP saying no (which probably won't happen when the MBAs can smell money to be made) to have the rules of compeition kick in and kill anyone not doing unmetered, unregulated. However, it sounds like SBC-ATT and Verizon are trying to pull a [MP|RI]AA scam and get the laws changed so that anyone NOT doing this would be breaking the law.
I like how corporations not only no longer care about their consumers, but are actively working to make them all criminals.
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