How A Better Democrat Rolls

Time Warner Cable took a tentative step in New York toward billing Internet customers based on consumption rates, a Trojan horse to two-tiered pricing on the Internet. And the usage limits were designed to gouge consumers and, since they have a monopoly, offer them essentially no other viable options.

Eric Massa took on the issue and won.

I live just about on the border of New York’s 28th and 29th Congressional districts. The 28th is represented by Louise Slaughter, the powerful chair of the Rules Committee, the 29th by freshman Congressman Eric Massa. I emailed both Massa and Slaughter about the cap. I heard nothing back from Slaughter. Massa’s office told me that they thought it was a serious issue, that they were getting complaints from a lot of constituents…and then sprung into action. The opening line of the video below (via) is “I plan on putting the entire full force of my incumbency and all the risk associated with that behind stopping this very, very ill-thought out decision by Time-Warner.”



Shortly after this, Time-Warner shelved their cap plan. Apparently, it was all a “big misunderstanding.”

More on this here. Eric Massa won election as a better Democrat with significant help from the netroots. And then he turns around and stands up on the significant issue of net neutrality. This is how progressive movement power turns into policy muscle.

It's A Big Internet And Everybody Wants A Piece

If the Associated Press thinks that restricting their content is going to result in a successful business model online, they might want to give The New York Times a call. They discontinued their protected content because they knew they were losing money in the long run. Information on the Web wants to be free, and you end up making more money for yourself and your member publishers by allowing the excessive linking of the blogosphere to raise your traffic. If you restrict that in any way you're just going to end up having bloggers like me stop linking to you entirely. And while I'm small potatoes, others aren't, and having the whole political Internet avoid the AP isn't going to do a lot for their bottom line.

Now this story is somewhat different. Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T are toying with charging customers through "Internet metering," making their highest-bandwidth users pay the freight, just as electricity customers pay for usage. That's not necessarily out of bounds, as long as some content (like that brandished by the service provider) isn't prioritized over others. But it is an old model of how ISPs have dealt with content, most similar to AOL's pay for service in the 1990s. That stagnated competition then and is sure to do so now.

The real importance of net neutrality is not so much to protect people from discrimination, but to create rational incentives for a better, more efficient Internet in the face of capacity constraints.

To back up, one benefit of capacity constraints (for now) is that they create demand for a solution. Indeed, the way we “solve” this problem will determine the future of the Internet.

For instance, in a world of access tiering, companies have less of an incentive to increase capacity – that’s because scarcity will have been built into the business model. For that reason, a world of access tiering will depress innovation and be less receptive to new, data-intensive applications/services. Thus, in this world, companies would solve the capacity problem by assuming more control and increasingly relying on bandwidth scarcity for revenue.

If, however, companies had to be content/application neutral, different solutions would necessarily emerge. Companies would be forced to build more capacity or to find better ways to compress data. There would also be greater demand for solutions from “the edge” – i.e., individual companies and entrepreneurs (e.g., BitTorrent) would have more incentives to create new data-compression techniques. And, frankly, I have more faith in the collective mind to develop these new services than say Comcast and AT&T.

Adding to this, I'd say that those companies who don't have the money to innovate would see less traffic because their service would be necessary costlier. And it would lead to the service provider delivering a lot of the video and high-bandwidth content in house. Furthermore, allowing charging for bandwidth is a slippery slope, and I simply don't trust the telecoms to take only one bite of the apple.

The sick thing is that there's plenty of money to be made off the Internet, by the AP or Time Warner or whoever, but it's greed that's driving these decisions.