The Wall Street Journal this week lashed out at Kevin Martin for his decision to sanction Comcast for their use of TCP packet forgery to throttle P2P. In addition to completely missing some of Martin's underlying motivations for roughing up Comcast, the editorial trots out one of the most familiar anti-net-neutrality arguments -- namely that people (or Google) aren't paying enough for bandwidth, and that network neutrality folks want to prevent ISPs from charging more money to improve capacity:
quote:
Net neutrality proponents.... would prohibit Internet service providers from using price to address the ever-growing popularity of streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive programs that cause bottlenecks.
Of course as Mike Masnick at
Techdirt and Tim Lee at the
Technoloby Liberation Front note, nobody in DC (especially telco friendly FCC boss Martin) is interested in stopping carriers from charging consumers more money. In fact, as I
suggested yesterday, the primary result of Martin's investigation will likely be a broader shift to metered billing. It's likely one of Martin's goals here (aside from political gain) is to warm the industry bed for a metered billing shift, which the Journal would probably support if they actually understood the issue.
In DC nobody cares, but there is strong consumer resistance to the ISP argument that users (or Google) aren't paying enough for the bandwidth they use, and that metered billing is a necessary tool to manage congestion. Perhaps neutrality mainstays like
Tim Wu are ok with the shift to metered billing as progress, but many American broadband customers are not.
First, while the cost of bandwidth continues to drop, ISPs continue to find ways to increase profits (advertising via webmail, BVAS, selling your clickstream data, DNS Redirection revenue, charging to get around spam filters, targeted behavioral advertising). Add these on top of fairly robust monthly bandwidth costs (Americans pay more than 20 other OECD ranked countries for broadband, and usually for less speed). ISPs are not hurting financially. The pressure to change industry pricing models is manufactured.
While there are opponents of metered billing (I'm one), the concern isn't that carriers are going to raise prices reasonably to pay for consumption. I'm more than happy to be bumped to a more expensive tier should my consumption be egregious. The concern is that by opening the door to metered billing, carriers will use the system to price-gouge already profitable customers (early trials are already charging consumers 1,500% over cost per GB). I also believe there's a strong temptation to use the metered model to kill off competing video delivery options.
People need to remember how the net-neutrality debate really took off. In 2005, then-AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week that because people use Google, Google should help pay for AT&T's network deployment (or as Ed put it, Google ain't usin' his pipes for free). In short, ISP executives want to please investors by offloading necessary video-driven upgrade expenses on to others. Network neutrality is about very profitable companies wanting to become more profitable at any cost. That's really all it has ever been about.
The FCC's sanctioning of Comcast doesn't change that, it simply reconfigures the debate landscape. Now instead of secretly throttling your connection, ISPs simply want to "transparently" over bill you for it. Whatever your opinion on this front, one thing's clear from this weeks multitude of editorials: the FCC's investigation has already shifted the public argument from non-transparent throttling to transparent metered billing. Perhaps, for some, that was the plan all along.
