My Brush With an Internet Celebrity

I have an odd and interesting personal experience to share with you all. Normally I wouldn't blog about anything as personal and irreverent as this, but it's really too good not to share.

A couple of weekends ago my wife, children and I were traipsing around a local mall, when we came across a harpist who was performing and selling some CDs that she had recorded. Her music was quite pleasant and as it turns out, she had recorded a CD of music for young children to listen to while going to sleep. So I picked up one of the CDs for my kids. I didn't recognize the harpist, a woman named Merry Miller, and assumed she was simply a local who was trying to market her music. Little did I know that I had just brushed up against a bona fide internet celebrity. Apparently Ms. Miller the harpist is also the same Merry Miller that conducted a disastrous interview with the actress Holly Hunter that gained some notoriety on the internet a couple of years ago. A recap:

It's an interview that will live in infamy. You'd have to be living under a rock if you haven't seen the notorious "What's the Buzz" episode hosted by Merry Miller.

Leaked to the Web, the interview has taken the media world by storm, popping up on YouTube, Gawker and VH1's "Best Week Ever," to name a few. Millions of people have seen Miller in one of her first attempts at a television career, and the businesswoman has skyrocketed to instant stardom as a result.

[...]

Miller was set to do a live satellite interview with Academy Award winner Holly Hunter about her new TNT show, "Saving Grace." During these types of interviews, hosts and stars appear to be able to see each other, but in reality, they are usually looking into a camera. They rely on ear pieces called IFBs to hear each other during the interview.

Unfortunately for Miller and unknown to the crew, her IFB failed before she began speaking with Hunter. Another host might have known to alert the crew about the problem and delay the interview while the technical issues were worked out, but the inexperienced Miller gamely tried to speak with Hunter without hearing her responses.

"I couldn't hear her, and it's very hard to talk to somebody like that," Miller said. "I give credit to Holly Hunter. She was a pro, a class act. She saved the interview."

The video of the disastrous interview became something of an internet phenomenon, so much so that even I recall hearing about it at the time (and I have a short memory when it comes to internet phenomena that don't involve Star Wars or video games.) Now of course I don't remember Ms. Miller from her interview, and the only reason I even discovered the connection is because I Googled her name trying to find her website (on which I assumed she might sell other CDs as well.) 

Now, I enjoy technology in general and the internet in particular as much as anybody else (probably more than a lot of people, as evidence by the fact that I'm practically on it all the time in some form or fashion.) And I've certainly guffawed and gawked at the endless parade of embarassing, humiliating, amusing or otherwise hilarious videos and whatnot that end up online of which there is an apparently endless supply (many placed online by the actual subjects of the hilarious video, who either don't understand the difference between celebrity and notoriety or don't care, or don't quite appreciate how much fifteen minutes of fame actually costs.) That being said, I've never really been comfortable with the power of the internet to turn somebody's bad day into days or weeks of amusemenet for anyone who can get online. The vitriol or mean-spirited humor that some of these people are subjected to by viewers of their folly frequently seems out of proportion to the error being documented in video, as if the bumbler has somehow committed an offense against humanity by daring to permit their exploits to be recorded and leaked to the internet (of course, some people commit what to the rest of us would be embarassing or humiliating acts in order to court exactly this sort of online notoriety, and so it's a little harder to feel much sympathy for them.) It's always easy to laugh at someone that you don't know, which is perhaps why I feel a particular incongruity reading about Ms. Miller's embarassing experience. I met Ms. Miller in person and she was very kind and courteous and quite sweet to my son, and having long-fogotten about her online embarssment, I feel like she's someone that I "know" when I try to re-watch her particularly bad day. Suddenly, it's not as funny as it probably was the first time around. 

So what's the moral of this story? Well, there isn't one, except to say a peculiar coincidence prompted me to ponder the consequences of internet fame and notoriety and then share my thoughts with you. Oh, and that you really should buy one of Ms. Miller's CDs. 

Why are parts of the US a broadband backwater?

For the second year running, the U.S. ranked 15th among the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development in terms of broadband availability.

This article from Business Week is worth reading because it details exactly how bad our internet is. Did you know you can get speeds of up to 120 MBps in Japan, and that over there 60 is common? By contrast, the fastest Verizon offers (non-business) is 15MBps! And that's for those of us living in big cities where there's plenty of competition!

This piece from Save The Internet follows up on that:

Across the state, 95 towns have limited or no access to high-speed Internet. People in Massachusetts’ more rural western half have had to resort to a game of Internet hide and seek — searching out wireless hotspots, with laptops plugged into car lighters and nestled in their laps.

Maureen Mullaney of Ashfield, Massachusetts, lives in one of these under-served towns. She seeks out these roadside hotspots so her children can do research for school projects. “How silly is it that in this day and age you have to get in your car, drive to the general store so your daughter can researchers the rivers and traditional clothing of Chile?” she asks.

And:

In real terms this means Internet users in Japan pay little more than half the price (65 cents to the dollar) for an Internet connection that’s 20 times faster than what’s commonly available to people in the United States.

Yep. Their point is that we don't have a national broadband plan in place to change this, and the current administration has blocked any attempts by declaring that the free market will solve all problems. As we can see (especially now) that is not true. When President Obama is in office and we have Democratic majorities in both houses, it'll be time to get it right.

Al Qaeda 2.0

Via Kevin Drum, this article by Daniel Kimmage about al Qaeda's slightly old-fashioned method of information distribution via the internet really is interesting, but we should remember that al Qaeda's success or failure will be premised on real world operations. A spectacular attack will do more to recruit followers than "user-generated content", and real-world setbacks cannot be made up for by any number of internet marketing techniques.

In other internet news...

The Progressive States Network has put together this report about the development of broadband in the United States and how it has not achieved the level of pervasiveness that President Bush has claimed.

Even more interesting are some of the state-level plans that have come about in response to the need to speed up development of broadband networks. I suggest reading this report in full and contacting your representatives to tell them you support similar programs.

Support Representative Edward Markey's Net Neutrality bill

Finally, a bill is being introduced which will legislate Net Neutrality into being. Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey is introducing HR 5353(pdf file). The essence of this bill is that it would prohibit "unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators" to "to preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks".

Naturally the telecommunications companies are opposed to this bill:

Markey's proposal was greeted with skepticism by some telecommunications companies. An advocacy group that represents some of the companies, called Hands Off the Internet, said it had no objection to studying the issue but opposed any further regulations.

Such regulations "will create uncertainty for investors and Internet service providers that must build the infrastructure to meet consumer demands," said Hands Off the Internet.

(Read the comments on this post for more information about Hands Off the Internet.)

Read some of my older posts for discussions of Net Neutrality.

I have not changed my position: I strongly favor writing Net Neutrality into law and preventing any possible abuses before they occur, although some may have already. TWM officially endorses Mukasey's bill. If you want to offer your support, go here or look up your politicians through Project Vote Smart and make your voice heard. As always, you can make a difference, so don't be afraid to write your call your elected representatives.

A dumb move by Time Warner

Sigh...why aren't we already in a broadband utopia? There are enough services and service providers, the problem is we don't all have all of them. Actually most of us only have one or two options, if there is an option at all! And things are made worse by the fact that instead of moving to fiber-optic (like Verizon Fios), companies like Time-Warner are still relying on copper. Not only does that hamper speed, it makes it harder for them to expand their networks to keep bandwidth up with demand. The way Roadrunner (the Time-Warner broadband internet division) works, you don't even get the maximum capacity you pay for most of the time. If other people are on the network, you may get about half speed. That's one reason why this is an especially boneheaded move by them:

Last week, we learned from a leaked memo that Time Warner Cable is preparing to roll out usage-based broadband service tiers to new customers in Beaumont, TX. The company has since confirmed its plans, with monthly bandwidth caps set at 5GB, 10GB, 20GB, and 40GB. Customers who exceed their cap would be hit with an undetermined per-gigabyte charge, but Bell Canada's overage fees, which range from CAN$1.00 to CAN$7.50 per gigabyte, may give some inkling of where Time Warner's overage fees will end up.

I recommend reading this article in full, but it can be summed up by this passage:

All of that is to say that cable and DSL won't always be the only games in town. If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits, capped cable broadband service like Time Warner has planned is likely to be unattractive, to say the least.

I can guarantee you that if they try to push that on me, I'll be subscribing to a new service.

The Right Wing Spams You

Via Kevin Drum, here's an interesting (if trivial) article on all those ridiculous pro-American, pro-flag, pro-God emails that your conservative relatives keep sending you:

The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult talking...during the playing of the National Anthem--kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ...and the American Soldier").

....From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.

I really hate those emails...especially the one I got most recently, telling me that if I "supported the troops" I'd forward the email to seven other people. Why seven? Why not twenty-five? Is that asking too much...like a war surplus tax, or actually serving in the military? Forwarding to seven is the chain email equivalent of getting a magnetic sticker I guess. The actual email itself was replete with images of "the troops" (including fictional ones) and as conservative chain emails go it wasn't so bad (except for the forwarding to support the troops bit.)

I don't know what you do with this crap except delete it, though I suppose if you're willing to have a little fun you can alter key parts of the email and then forward it around, and wait to see how long it is until you get it back from someone else. Anyway, if you're one of the people who sends me this crap, stop it okay? If you are going to change my mind about anything, it won't happen via unsubtle, over-the-top, sappy and inaccurate emails.

Broadband

That's it, I'm moving to Japan:

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

How are things on our end?

Chicago`s stalled talks to create a citywide wireless Internet network come as municipal broadband wireless projects nationwide face troubles.

Other cities -- San Francisco, Philadelphia and Houston among them -- also had visions of free, advertiser-supported high-speed Internet connections citywide. But politics, as well as technological advancements, have come into play.

Dammit!

Why is America's internet so slow?

Have you ever gotten frustrated with how long downloading something like video clips can be, or how laggy your internet radio station is, even with a broadband connection? Yeah, AT&T and Comcast like to tell you they offer speeds "Fifty times faster than dial-up!" Well, that's like Ford saying they offer a car fifty times faster than a turtle. It's not very impressive. According to this article Wise Man Adam sent me, other nations in the developed world have average speeds 10 or 20 times faster than our average broadband speed. The article says:

The Federal Communications Commission, which has broad sway over the emerging broadband market, defines "high speed" as 200 kilobits per second. The benchmark was adopted more than a dozen years ago when still-slower dial-up was the rule. Cohen says 200 kilobits is not even recognized as broadband in most countries today. "There is nothing speedy about it."

The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second - a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, says the report released Monday. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits).

Before I read this I didn't know that they offered speeds like that anywhere in the world. 61Mbps is frickin fast!

I would offer two comments about this though that might give some explanation as to why our broadband networks haven't increased speed as fast. One, the US has more broadband subscribers than any other nation in the world (including China) and is far larger geographically than many of the ones we're compared to such as Japan, and you notice that Canada has an average speed of 7Mbps, so I think that proves geography has something to do with it. And again, with more users the slower the network. If I had a cable node all to myself, I could easily have 30Mbps, but I don't. Second, and perhaps more importantly, US companies routinely take anti-competitive measures against potential competitors. For example, tv providers tried to block Verizon Fios from entering the market because it also offers tv, and AT&T tried to block Comcast from offering VOIP services with their cable internet. Ours is not exactly a free market.

Verizon Fios does offer a respectable 15Mbps service, but they don't even offer service to all of Dallas yet. Time-Warner offers up to 10Mbps in areas where they're in competition with other ISPs, but not in areas where they aren't. I'm not sure what legislative action we could take that would change anything substantially, unless the federal government got involved with the building of infrastructure.

As a case in point, that's kind of what they do in Japan, and it's part of the reason their speeds there are so high. According to this article:

Japan, through its u-Japan broadband strategy, provides money for cities to wire schools and community centers, provides zero-interest or low-interest loans for cities and businesses to deploy broadband, and provides tax breaks for the purchase of networking equipment, Ebihara said.

Unlike in the United States, Japan's two incumbents are required to share their last-mile copper loops, their fiber loops and their Internet backbone with competitors, Ebihara said. Since 2003, the Federal Communications Commission has ended most sharing requirements for incumbents like AT&T, arguing that providers should build their own networks.

Large U.S. incumbents AT&T and Verizon Communications argued that requirements to share broadband facilities with competitors discouraged them from improving their networks or building new fiber networks. They also called on the FCC to create regulatory parity between DSL and cable modem service, which was not required to share its lines with competitors.

NTT East has also lobbied to end the network-sharing rules, Ebihara said. But it has moved ahead with laying high-speed fiber networks to Japanese homes even though it has lost the network-sharing fight with the Japanese government so far, he said. NTT East's fiber-to-the-home service now passes 75% of the households in the company's region.

So basically, in Japan they do exactly what oppoonents argue would discourage network growth...but the companies still expand service because they're still making money. Yep. Those who argue that regulation is always a bad thing need to look at the rest of the world.

Interestingly, there is something in the works over here that may provide more options and cause the market to become more competitive. This bill is being proposed by Senator Kerry. Here's the gist of it:

The WIN Act specifically requires the FCC to permit license-free use of the unassigned broadcast spectrum between 54MHz and 698 MHz within 180 days of enactment. This legislation will enable entrepreneurs to provide affordable, competitive high-speed wireless broadband services in areas that otherwise have no connectivity to broadband Internet.

This spectrum apparently is the range of frequencies being abandoned by analog broadcasters as tv moves over to all-digital signals, so it'll actually have a very high throughput.

Although, those providers still have to be ISPs themselves, and there's little chance of your average person doing that! But it just might provide some incentive for smaller ISPs to get in on the action and offer cut-rate pricing on very fast broadband.

Net Neutrality III

In case you're not a tech-head, you may not have gotten caught up in the (mostly online) debate about Net Neutrality. You can read my old posts as an explanation of what it is, who's for and against it, and what you can do about it. You might want to educate yourself on it because it's gaining recognition as an important issue. In truth, it's not really a conservative vs. liberal issue so much as it is a individual vs. corporation issue. The only problem is that the conservatives are allied with the big telecoms, which is why they've been making a fuss by blocking any Net Neutrality legislation thus far. This article in the Washington Post provides a good summary thus far. Here's why people are for Net Neutrality:

Net neutrality is a principle that bars Internet providers, primarily phone and cable companies, from charging higher rates to Web-based firms in return for giving their content priority treatment on the pathways to consumers. Without such restrictions, proponents say, a user might find it time-consuming, or even impossible, to call up a favorite site that carriers have relegated to slower lanes for economic or even philosophical reasons.

Here's why people are against it:

Net neutrality restrictions "could prevent broadband providers from offering enhanced levels of service for specialized applications such a telemedicine, or to offer their own branded or co-branded products or services," said Christopher Wolf, co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, a group sponsored by phone and cable companies . Such arrangements, he said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop, "will help pay for the build-out of the next generation of Internet pipes."

And in rebuttal:

Moreover, Wolf said, his industry's critics cannot cite an example in which any U.S. user has been blocked.

But some groups that rely heavily on their Web sites to share information, raise money or promote causes say they fear it's only a matter of time. They cite, for example, a 2005 comment by William L. Smith, then chief technology officer for BellSouth, which has merged with AT&T, that Internet service providers should be able to charge a firm such as Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than Google's site.

Now, whatever hifalutin language is used on either side of this debate, it comes down to this: bandwidth providers want to be able to charge data providers for different levels of service and individual bandwidth users don't want that. That's as plain as I can say it with no judgments involved as to who is more right. But proponents of either argument aren't leaving it that simply, so there is definitely a need to clarify. Here's an articulate argument against Net Neutrality (until, at least, it becomes an obvious necessity).

Network neutrality is supposed to promote continuing Internet innovation by restricting the ability of network owners to give certain traffic priority based on the content or application being carried or on the sender's willingness to pay. The problem is that these restrictions would prohibit practices that could increase the value of the Internet for customers.

Traffic management is a prime example. When traffic surges beyond the ability of the network to carry it, something is going to be delayed. When choosing what gets delayed, it makes sense to allow a network to favor traffic from, say, a patient's heart monitor over traffic delivering a music download. It also makes sense to allow network operators to restrict traffic that is downright harmful, such as viruses, worms and spam.

Kind of a red herring though. Legislation can make what whatever provisions it needs to ensure that medical or emergency traffic is assured of speedy delivery. This includes things like remote surgery or VOIP calls to 911. Not only that, but as far as the technical side of things, data "surges" can be accomodated by laying more fiber down. That's what you pay your ISP for. That's what they're supposed to be spending some of that revenue on. Furthermore, that's not what people at AT&T are talking about. Don't believe in corporate goodwill; they want to charge web content providers for the privilege of faster access to their websites. And there's nothing stopping them from regulating the flow of viruses, worms, and spam now...so why aren't they doing it?

Pricing raises similar issues. To date, Internet pricing has been relatively simple. Based on experience in similar markets, we expect that, if left alone, pricing and service models will probably evolve. For example, new services with guaranteed delivery quality might emerge to support applications such as medical monitoring that require higher levels of reliability than the current Internet can guarantee. Suppliers could be expected to charge higher prices for these premium services.

Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a "fast lane" mail service is "undemocratic." Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.

Let's say you're an at-home patient who needs 24 hour medical monitoring. You pay the hospital or whoever it is to do the monitoring and you pay the ISP for access to the internet. Now the argument is that your monitoring service should be able to pay the ISP for guaranteed data transmission without fail. That would be a premium service, and in such cases reliability is absolutely paramount. But that doesn't mean it should be adopted as a model for the entire internet. As a matter of fact, I think it would be safer to adopt Net Neutrality with the provision that such medical services must receive first priority. Before you argue that it's impossible to distinguish what kind of information is being trasmitted (that is, the ISP couldn't tell the difference between a heartrate monitor and hardcore porn), remember that it is possible to differentiate between where the data goes. Any domain registered with the ISP with legitimate credentials would get a free pass. So even if the user laying in bed used the same connection to look at porn at the same time as his heart was being monitored, the ISP could give priority to one or the other.

This also brings up an important issue: most data bottlenecks happen in the vicinity of the end-point; that is, the receiver. When you're using your computer at home and notice a slow-down at about 5 or 6PM, that's because everybody in your neighborhood with your ISP got home and logged on. Your connection to Amazon or Yahoo or whoever is irrelevant because their webservers aren't being overloaded. That's whether you pay for 56K dialup or whether you pay for 15Mbps Verizon Fios. Net Neutrality won't affect that one way or the other, and whether Yahoo pays to load faster than Google or not, both will still be slower for you (unless you're rich of course and pay for a T1 of your own or something, which is what you can already do).

As far as the concerns the individual user, you'll never experience a change for the better. They can't give more bandwidth to those who pay, they can only slow down those who don't. As more and more users get online and more and more traffic is shuffled around the existing internet, you might see service degrade overall. That's why if bandwidth is an issue, the ISPs need to get in gear and roll out more fiber instead of increasing prices for a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. The answer to that is not to let the ISPs slow non-premium paying sites down, it's to increase the bandwidth overall. And finally, if so many users are visiting a website that it's slowing down, the ISP can't do anything about that anyway. That's an issue with the website, in that they need to buy more servers and buy more bandwidth (not faster). But you rarely find websites to be like that. Some instances are when tickets go on sale (at ticketmaster.com, for example), or over the holidays when Amazon was having special offers and you had to log on at a certain time. Otherwise, it happens during a Denial of Service attack. All of this has nothing to do with your ISP, and that's why the idea of them offering "Premium Service" has no meaning to you or me and seems like merely a way of extorting more money from web content providers and giving us trouble by slowing down sites that can't pay for it.

The analogy of the Postal Service does not stand. The Post office moves all mail at the same speed, except for the stuff you pay extra for. They move that faster. The ISPs can't offer to move any data faster, as it all moves at the same speed (relative to your websites, ISP servers, and you). You can't pay for any data to get to you any faster. It's not even possible because of the technical limitations (like how your email gets turned into a bunch of different data packets and takes innumerable paths through a bunch of different servers along the route; who are you going to pay?). The Post office doesn't slow all mail down so that you can buy a premium service which gets to you at the same speed all mail used to; it actually does speed it up. It's not the same thing at all.

We're not saying that all discrimination is good or that the market always gets it right. Some forms of discrimination can be harmful, especially when service providers have market power. For example, if a local telephone company that is a monopoly provider of both broadband access and plain old telephone service for a community blocks its broadband subscribers from using an Internet phone service offered by a rival company, this discrimination can harm both competition and consumers.

Does this mean we believe that we should place all our trust in the market and the current providers? No. But it does mean we should wait until there is a problem before rushing to enact solutions.

What does the market ever get right except making money for those who own resources? How many times do I have to point out the example of the Robber Barons for what an unregulated market does? Why wait for problems to arise and then solve them after they've already caused trouble? Look, the Ford Pinto had problems that Ford knew about when they designed it. But because there weren't any laws that would harm Ford or keep them from building it, they went ahead and did it. When the public and the government know that a problem probably will arise because of some action a corporation is taking, it's better to stop it before it begins, not after!

Here are my own thoughts on this issue. Let's say you want to go online and look at Amazon.com to shop for books. First, Amazon establishes itself online. It buys its servers and pays an ISP for access. The default speed is the speed of electrons through copper wire or the speed of light through fiber optic lines. This speed is, of course, impeded by the hosts en route between the provider and end user. The ISP lays out the copper wire or fiber and charges for people to use it by the amount of data they move. You pay an ISP to get online for basically the same thing, except more data comes into your computer than leaves it. At the level of the individual, you basically pay for the speed level instead of the data amount because you actually use so little data. That means that no matter how fast data flows out onto the Internet, you can only get it as fast as you can get it and you're paying for the privilege. So there's Amazon, ISP1 (the ISP Amazon uses), ISP2 (the ISP you use), and you. Now Amazon is paying umpteen-million a month for using somebody's lines. Let's say you're paying about $50 a month for broadband.

Now what ISP1 is proposing is that for an extra fee, they'll let Amazon keep the same speed as before and they won't let them be slowed down, whereas for Blogger.com that doesn't pay for the premium, it will be serviced at a slower rate. Now if both rates are above your 15Mbps connection (if you have such), it doesn't matter to you. But it's not likely that both will be above that speed, and if the ISP feels it necessary, it may actually service that website at a slower speed, like 3Mbps. So no matter what bandwidth you pay for, you'll only be getting what the other ISP feels like giving. Or maybe they won't limit it overall, but at peak times, your connection to Blogger.com will be slowed down whereas your connection to Amazon.com will remain nice and perky. You may not care, but what if you do? Envision this also; whatever surcharge they add on for premium service to Amazon will be rolled into your purchases from Amazon.com because they're not going to eat the costs. Part of the price of an item is already their operating costs, because they're not shy about charging you for them. Let's say there's another site you shop from, Bookstore.com, which is pretty much exactly like Amazon.com but it doesn't pay for premium speed. When you buy from Amazon, items may be a little more expensive, but you can browse faster. When you buy from Bookstore, items are the same old price but it's hella slow. And in both cases you're paying for their costs, but in the case of Amazon you're paying extra so that you can get the same old site speed and service. What good is that to you? It sounds like crap to me.

Ok, if ISPs want to charge more for laying more cable or fiber for a guaranteed service which is separate from their services in general, that's fine with me. But it's not fine with me if the speed I pay for is irrelevant when it comes to internet services. It's not fair, but what am I going to do, quit using the internet? Is that like how we're supposed to control market prices of food by not eating when food prices are high? You may think that's a hyperbolic comparison, but is it so much when you're the one on the heart monitor?

Net Neutrality

In case you haven't seen this topic in the news, basically the big telcos are asking Congress to allow them to restructure internet access such that websites will basically have to pay for whatever degree of speed they want you to have on their website. For example, if you have broadband and you pretty much get all pages to load instantaneously now, after this restructuring you might find that while Amazon.com still loads quickly, your local newspaper (or your favorite blog, Three Wise Men) loads at the same speed you'd get with a 56k modem. And this is not exaggerating, this is exactly what the telcos are aiming for. Bigger sites with more money get more access, which is a corporate model. This column sums up the problem nicely.

For the past several years, the Federal Communications Commission has enforced a view of broadband regulation that emphasizes competition between types of broadband while effectively ruling out meaningful competition within broadband delivery methods. Hence the ruling that cable companies and DSL providers need not lease their lines to competing ISPs if they don't want to (and why would they?).

By the FCC's reckoning, that means I have broadband choice here on the northwest side of Chicago. Well, sort of. For cable, my sole choice is Comcast-and that's what I use, with few service complaints. On the other hand, DSL is not an option for me because of the lousy infrastructure in my over 80-year-old neighborhood and my distance from the DSLAM. Broadband over power lines? Not yet. Citywide WiFi network? A gleam in Mayor Daley's eye. WiMAX? Some day, maybe. Broadband choice? Not in any coherent sense of the word.

You should read the article linked to in the header as well as the rest of this column. To me this is not some abstract issue of free-market vs. regulation because you can't even begin to make the argument that consumer choice exists. And when your cable company decides what content to prioritize (or shut off access to it completely), it's anything but free.

Save the internet

PS: The Save the Internet movement is an activity of Moveon.org. They're not attempting to hide it, but if you didn't get that, now you know.