Courtesy of Alec Saunders, this essay by Brad Templeton on how a “two-tiered” Internet violates what he calls the real innovation of the Internet — the Internet “cost contract.” In short, Templeton maintains that the Internet fostered so much innovation because usage-based pricing fell by the wayside at some point, enabling the rise of what have become indispensable tools and applications that wouldn’t have cut the mustard if the market had to worry about per-packet pricing.
The internet cost contract is “I pay for my end, you pay for yours, and we don’t sweat the packets.” It is this approach, not any particular technology, that fostered the great things that came from the internet.
A two-tiered Internet, with broadband providers charging content and applications providers more to deliver high-bandwidth services, violates this cost contract and distorts the market, Templeton says. The solution, he seems to be advocating, is to charge consumers, not third-party providers, more for their end of the contract because they are the ones consuming more bandwidth.
The pipes start off belonging to the ISPs but they sell them to their customers. The customers are buying their line to the middle, where they meet the line from the other user or site they want to talk to. The problem is generated because the carriers all price the lines at lower than they might have to charge if they were all fully saturated, since most users only make limited, partial use of the lines. When new apps increase the amount a typical user needs, it alters the economics of the ISP. They could deal with that by raising prices and really delivering the service they only pretend to sell, or by charging the other end, and breaking the cost contract.
Um, I’m not sure this argument would withstand serious deconstruction, even though it is true that one solution to this whole net neutrality mess is to give consumers very high-bandwidth service. In any event, the Congress, which has the power to impose rules and regulations surrounding net neutrality, would be hard pressed to justify any scheme that intentionally raises consumer costs.
Templeton is on firmer ground when he discusses AOL’s Goodmail program. Calling AOL’s proposal to charge per email for better delivery a kind of “protection racket,” Templeton says
The charging per message sets a nasty precedent which is an attack on the internet cost contract. It violates the rule about not sweating the individual traffic. I pay for my end, you pay for yours. As soon as we start deciding some traffic is good and bad, and some traffic has to pay to transit the pipes or get through the filters, we’ve taken a step backwards to the settlement based networks that the internet defeated decades ago.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:08 AM | Print | Comments (1)
A week doesn’t go by without at least one or two articles that reveal just how quickly the educational community is embracing the iPod as a learning tool. AP’s Greg Bluestein has this piece today about tiny Georgia College & State University and that school’s cutting-edge incorporation of the iPod in its varied curricula and adminstrative efforts.
Aside from making lectures available online for downloading to the portable devices, the university’s faculty directs students to download films so that the students don’t have to waste class time viewing them and develops audio Q-and-A to answer students’ questions, among other innovative uses for the iPod. The school even has a faculty and staff group, called the iDreamers, devoted to developing new uses for the iPod.
The 300-faculty school has been so successful in using the iPod in learning situations that it has been chosen to host in November something Apple calls its Digital Campus Leadership Institute.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:37 AM | Print | Comments (0)In a career path reversal, former FCC Commissioner Rachelle Chong has joined the California Public Utilities Commission as the newest of the state’s five PUC members. This San Jose Mercury News item about Chong’s new job unfortunately dwells on what many in Washington knew when Chong was at the FCC: Chong is a Trekkie.
Yup, Chong, a communications attorney who practiced before the FCC before joining it as a Commissioner and has practiced in California for the past seven years, was inspired to focus on the industry by Star Trek.
“That was why I went to Washington to practice before the FCC,” said Chong, an attorney who has represented wireless carriers both on the federal and state level. The Federal Communication Commission’s regulations were creating the environment for “something as cool as a wireless phone that worked anywhere in the universe. Well, we aren’t quite there yet.”
On a more serious note, she has come under fire from some advocates in California for being too pro-business in her philosophy.
“She’s developed a very consistent record so far of doing exactly what the industry has wanted her to do,” said Bob Finkelstein, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group that works with the PUC. “She very much believes that this is such a competitive industry that there is very little need for regulation, and that is exactly what the carriers want her to believe.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:56 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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