"HANDS-UP!"
The New York Times has a Sunday article very much worth reading, titled "Hey, Baby Bells: Information Still wants to be free".
It amplifies concerns very much "top-of-mind" for me, as previous posts have outlined. As the piece suggests:
"The broadband carriers that we have today provide service that attains negative perfection: low speeds at high prices.
It gets worse. Now these same carriers - led by Verizon Communications and BellSouth - want to create entirely new categories of fees that risk destroying the anyone-can-publish culture of the Internet. And they are lobbying for legislative protection of their meddling with the Internet content that runs through their pipes. These are not good ideas.
Slow broadband seems to be our cursed lot. Until we get an upgrade - or rather an upgrade to an upgrade - the only Americans who will enjoy truly fast and inexpensive service will be those who leave the country. In California, Comcast cable broadband provides top download speeds of 6 megabits a second for a little more than $50 a month.
That falls well short, however, of Verizon's 15-megabit fiber-based service offered on the East Coast at about the same price. But what about the 100-megabit service in Japan for $25 month? And better, much better: Stockholm's one-gigabit service - that is, 1,000 megabits, or more than 1,300 times faster than Verizon's entry-level DSL service - for less than 100 euros, or $120, a month."
Lawrence Lessig offers an explanation for this widening gap internationally in another worth reading post:
"Verizon’s entry-level broadband is $14.95 for 786 kbs. That about $20 per megabit. In FRANCE, for $36/m, you get 20 megabits/s — or about $1.80 per megabit.
How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore.
Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan."
And as others and I have noted, the telcos have the gall to keep trying to offer less for more. This is not going to be easy to counter. As Tom Evslin noted recently in an excellent post titled "It's Time to Worry about the RBOCs":
"The Baby Bells (once known as RBOCs for Regional Bell Operating Companies) have been a frightening lobbying force since they were spun off from parent AT&T in the 1980s. But they were kept in check by the formidable lobbies of AT&T and MCI and, for the last decade, by a bipartisan series of Federal Communication Commission Chairman including Democrats Reid Hundt and Bill Kennard and Republican Michael Powell.
The constraints are gone. AT&T in now part of SBC, symbolically re-branded “at&t”, and Verizon snapped up the wreckage of MCI. New FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has proven much better than Michael Powell at bringing the commission to consensus; trouble is that so far the consensus action seems to be to protect the RBOCs from competition or actually enhance their position.
The RBOCs are feeling their oats."
Fred Wilson sees the RBOC actions motivated by Jealousy:
"What's really going on is the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and the other Telcos are looking at their margins going down month after month while the service providers like Apple and Google, who deliver their services to consumers over the Telco's networks, are watching their margins go up and up.
We are witnessing some serious jealousy. These Telco guys want to do something about it. They want to charge Google or the customers of Google (ie us) for the privilege of that delivery."
In the long run, these telco initiatives are NOT likely to be successful, because it's all but impossible to fight the technology driven broadband tsunami, both wired and wireless.
But these initiatives CAN seriously delay the advent of more broadband at lower prices, especially vs. other countries, especially in an oligopolistic environment.
And that does matter.
But the telcos seem to act like their customers will continue to be pussycats as they try and push these changes through (picture via this site).
As I noted in a post last December:
"Consumers are going to have to do their part...
Somehow they'll need to mobilize, or help get mobilized to first be aware of the implications of these actions, and second, do something about them. In the long-term, the outcomes here will determine the competitiveness of the US economy on a global stage. And the fight for an "open, next-generation broadband Internet, both wired AND wireless is just beginning.
The Bypass Battles are likely to be a matter of life and death for all the industries involved."
As a side note while I finish this post, a Verizon commercial on TV ends with the tag line:
"Our People, Our Network"
It's great to see where CUSTOMERS come out in their world view.
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