I was reading this article, AT&T sees benefits to tiered Internet service, when the heavens parted above my head and a voice boomed forth, "Beware the Antichrist." OK, so there were no parting clouds or messages from a diety, but there was a bit of an epiphany. The people who own the copper wire or fiber optic cable over which the Internet flows are known as "public utilities". We allow them to operate as virtual monopolies in exchange for having a communications network which is not plagued with multiple redundancies. They, in turn, are supposed to provide us, their customers, with the service we pay for.
This article discusses the new AT&T's flirtation with providing tiers of service for their Internet customers. What I am hearing is that there will be extra charges above and beyond what you pay for that 6meg/second broadband connection. Oh, you want streaming music? Well, that's another $$ per month. You want to access your Flickr account and upload those 200 pictures you took of your kid playing soccer? Oops, that's another $$. In other words, what they are saying is that what you actually get for your wide pipe, broadband connection is about the same level of service a dial-up customer gets.
I don't listen to over-the-air radio at home anymore. What I listen to is Internet radio. And I pay for this by contributing to the radio stations I listen to (RadioParadise, hint, hint)When I purchase web access, that is all I am purchasing: access to the web with a maximum speed of whatever. When I am told that the size of the data pipe I'm getting is x/bps, that is what I expect to get. I don't want the supplier of that pipe filtering or interfering with the content I access.
The idea of monetizing the delivery of content by positioning yourself between the source and the destination is a seductive one for American owners of the pipes. It creates a revenue source with almost zero costs. Whatever income is generated, it will flow virtually untouched to the bottom line. What few costs there are are externalized to the consumer. And part of what we pay is not measured in money--it is measured in the loss of our freedom and our opportunity.
1 comment:
What is happening is an obvious result of the actions that led both AT&T and MCI to stop competing in the switched network LD market. SBC bought out AT&T and the effort to pull more money out of the now un-competed for pipes. The effort to break up the phone company some 20 years ago has come full circle and we can see that there is no real competition. So, prices will go up.
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