Google/Verizon to ruin Internet

Ah yes, the magic market will fix anything. As mentioned, the barriers to entry prevent this from being a classic open market and thus the correction mechanisms will be inefficient or non-existent.

 

McNuggetsMan, I agree with you to an extent about the free market approach. If companies start cracking down like that, alternatives will probably emerge.

There are, however, a couple things I want to throw out there. What do you think constitutes a space sucker? Believe it or not, online gaming uses much less bandwidth than watching a streaming video on a website, especially if you're watching something like HD videos. Much, much less bandwidth. A much more realistic scenario is that you're going to have to pay extra for decent speeds to YouTube or MLB.com or what-have-you.

Know what else uses more bandwidth? A lot of these Flash- or video-heavy sites that use all sorts of wild animations for their front pages. The stuff that uses the most bandwidth is what most people think of as the basic service, NOT niche users like gamers and developers. File-sharing does use a considerable amount of bandwidth, I'll concede that.

This is the problem with looking at internet content like cable. Who's handling the cost of getting you HBO? Well, your cable company needs to pay HBO to carry it. And HBO needs to pay people to produce it. And so on and so forth down the line. You paying a premium for HBO transitions back to HBO itself and the people it employs. That makes sense.

Now let's say Verizon and AT&T charge more for you to get access to MLB.com, because it uses up more bandwidth. Does that money go back to MLB.com? No! It goes to Verizon and AT&T. And in all likelihood, Verizon and AT&T are going to want MLB.com to pay more as well, for them to have access to that high-priority bandwidth. How does that make any sense?

Basically, the difference is that the cable companies are involved, economically, in the production of the content. There's a chain of buyers and sellers that stretches from the home viewer to the content producer. With a tiered content internet, there's no chain, because all Verizon and AT&T are are carriers. They don't charge you more for these extra services because they're not providing them. All they're doing is delivering them to you. And these content providers are, in a sense, providing this content for free to Verizon and AT&T. They don't have to pay YouTube for their subscribers to have access to these videos.

So, okay, maybe MLB.com can turn around and say, "Well, Verizon, if you want your customers to have access to my video, pay me some licensing fees." Okay, that works. There's probably going to be a big enough demand that Verizon will be willing to pay some licensing fees. But what about something like Twitter or Facebook? These companies started small, and were only able to build up because small companies get treated the same way as these big companies. Verizon's not going to pay Twitter or Facebook (back when they were small) a fee to carry their stuff, because when they started out small there wouldn't be enough demand. If Twitter and Facebook had been relegated to the ghetto of the internet, they'd have had a much bigger impediment to reaching people.

And here's a final point: there already is tiered internet, it's called a slower or faster connection. If you don't want to use all those bandwidth intensive services you're talking about, go back to dial-up or the slowest DSL you can find. It'll be pretty cheap and it won't affect the slower services you're talking about: basic email, basic internet browsing, and so on. Nobody's forcing you to pay for high-speed access.

 

I don't have time to respond to all the well constructed arguments in your response -- many of which I agree with. I was mostly trying to respond to the hysteric "they are going to shut down political sites they don't like", "they are going to screw over tiny little bloggers" "they aren't going to let my go to this news site" "they are going to block gmail/yahoo/whatever" that were dominating this thread. But I like the potential shift in the conversation that your post has created.

 

Right on. And here's the thing, we already pay more for Internet service than we should based on what other nations pay. What do we get for that? Speeds bordering on irrelevant on the international scene.

With the miserly way Verizon, AT&T and the cable companies issue bandwidth, they should be having no trouble managing whatever traffic their customers produce.

 

Google and Verizon have both denied this, incidentally.

 

The system as it is now is perfect. Nothing should change - pure and simple.

I wonder if "the father of the internet" and Google shareholder Al Gore will speak out against this.

 

Gotcha -- I agree, the political/paranoia stuff is silly, in my opinion. Companies are going to act like companies. At worst, that means they're greedy. If, in a hypothetical tiered internet scenario, there's money to be made carrying (for instance) the Huffington Post, you can be damn sure XYZ Internet Provider would carry it, whatever their political beliefs are.

 

People asked for theoretical reasons why we should care about net neutrality. Not likely scenarios.

 

Well, I think the best reason to care about net neutrality is that the creation and maintenance of the internet has been heavily subsidized and paid for with taxpayer money. From the initial military programs that led to the internet's precursors to its development at public universities to early financial support of the World Wide Web Consortium and massive subsidies to telephone companies for fiber-optics and other high-speed infrastructure, without the support of taxpayer money there would be no internet. Period. And that's not just US taxpayers, mind, but taxpayers from tons of countries all over the world.

For companies to come up with what is basically a plan to wring more money out of the very people that gave them this cushy financial position in the first place is ridiculous.

 

We have the greatest communication invention in human history on our hands, and we're going to decide that the best way to decide access is profitability?

 

I never said that. In fact, I think exactly the opposite. I just don't think it's a very convincing argument for net neutrality.

 

Wow. I don’t know if I’ve read a more wrong opinion on this topic than this right here.

What Google and Verizon are looking to do is save money on their end while increasing revenue. In order to understand this, you have to know a little about computers and web browsing.

If I load a page that I previously loaded that morning, certain portions of that page are loaded into cache. Those portions of the page will load quickly. Google will design the software that allows Verizon to cache portions of, say, ESPN.com. This means that ESPN will load quicker onto the devices.

Since we are talking about cell phones, which have a much slower data speed to start with, a company like ESPN would have a jump over the competition of, say, CBSSportsline.

It isn’t about politics. It is about access.

Google will essentially be funneling the traffic of the internet to a select group of websites. This will drop the costs of Verizon since it’ll be drawing from cache instead of connecting and downloading from a site each time. It will then make more money as it will be able to charge ESPN money for that faster access that forces more traffic to ESPN and thus more money from ad revenue.

Only to a point. Apparently, the deal they reached involves the data plans on cell phones.

First it starts at the cell phones. They see how much people complain. Then they move onto the home computing side.

The reality is that they really want to get this all done on the home computing side. It just makes good business.