Data Caps - your ISP is no longer a true access provider

Rogers Cable in Canada and dozens of other Internet Service Providers in Canada and the U.S. and Europe are capping your monthly data traffic. While caps vary, they're not really the point. What's important is that in many jurisdictions (in Canada and Europe in particular), data caps are a way around the regulatory strictures which force ISPs to get permission from regulatory bodies in order to raise monthly access fees.

See the trick? To hell with regulatory requirements when you can simply avoid the process altogether. All you have to do is cry bandwidth problems, throttle whatever data you want, point to fine print in the customer access contract, and then charge whatever you want for every gigabyte used over the arbitrary cap set on each regional or nodal block of subscribers.

I hate these people. They reaped big profits for years while allowing us to freely get used to downloading and browsing whatever we wanted. Now that we're almost addicted to high volumes of data, suddenly the ISPs impose data caps? Suddenly we're paying through the nose to view/browse/stream/download all the things which were covered by the fixed monthly fee for previously unrestricted internet access accounts?

Yes. We've been suckered.

All those profits went and continue to go to ISP shareholders and fat executive salaries and bonuses, not into the infrastructure needed to provide really great service, support and bandwidth to all the customers. Net neutrality is a dreamy myth. It never existed. The corporate communications mavens will no doubt soon attempt to charge us for just thinking about Internet access.

Governments sit back and do nothing. Governments hire consultants to help rip off billions in tax dollars in return for bad tech advice. Every last nickel will be milked out of the systems until people begin screaming and threatening, and only then will ISPs and governments react by (grudingly) enforcing the design and implementation of better quality and more consumer friendly Internet access.

In the meantime we pay ridiculous fees for Internet access, something which should be comoditized and turned into a public utility.

Comcast P2P, Expensive Music Downloads — Consumers Always Pay

Ars Technica reported Comcast's announcement of its plan to lead an industry partnership in the creation of a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" that would apply both to users and to ISPs. I think client p2p sponsored or offered by telcos, cable companies and their ISP operations has been lurking in the shadows for some time. I also think that previously the perceptible delay or the palpable resistance to p2p functionality by the telcos has resulted largely from an inability of the telcos to devise a worthwhile monetization plan. The obvious financial gain resulting from bandwidth usage and the accompanying charges to customers doesn't offset the huge potential load that existing infrastructure and switching would have to carry. But now that all the telcos and cable providers have thrown down the gauntlet and declared, essentially, that net neutrality (another buzzword for sure) is here and in the process of being implemented, it's quite possible that p2p functionality will suddenly become viable (and specifically chargeable as a service distinct from texting, phone calls, voice mail, caller ID, etc.).

The other question that giants like Comcast have recently asked their legal staff is "Are we opening the company to legal action brought by copyright holders if we enable p2p?" The most frequent answer seems to be that as long as Comcast promotes the use of p2p functionality, and more important, as long as copyright holders and managers such as Apple (through its iTunes web site) are willing to pay Comcast a tithe to ensure customers have fast access to the iTunes site (thereby provide sufficient revenue to make infrastructure loading and improvements worthwhile), everybody's ass is covered. No lawyer can then make a case against Comcast for enabling illegal file sharing the day after the same legal staff approves a deal for Apple to pay a fee to Comcast to ensure that Apple customers who are also Comcast customers have fast access to the iTunes store.

It's initially a complex equation. The most worrisome factor might be the degree to which Comcast and its competitors decide to impose potentially invasive usage monitoring to ensure specifically that p2p usage remains legal and within the guidelines for Fair Use set out in section 107 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Is the potential sacrifice of privacy worth the dubious privileges conferred by paying for a p2p feature on your cell phone? Possibly worse still, what will bandwidth payments by Apple to Comcast do to the purchase price of music downloads?

In the end, consumers pay, then pay again, and then yet again. What's the real cost of a music download on iTunes in such a situation? After accounting for the small proportionate cost of your ISP contract, cell phone plan, data plan, p2p client fee, bandwidth charges if you go over a monthly limit, the cost of a song download, the cost for the time required to burn a CD at home (for those people who prefer to listen to a CD in the car), the cost of the CD itself, the proportionate cost of hard drive storage space and backup storage space, and the cost for the time needed to make redundant backups of Digital Rights Management (CRM) licenses, purchasing music online may not be the bargain anyone thinks it is.

Non-Discriminatory Web

The father of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee told politicians at the US House of Representatives on Thursday that it was critical to protect the web from being control by a single company or country.

Berners- Lee stated in his conclusion that it was essential that "We ensure that that both technological protocols and social conventions respect basic values. That Web remains a universal platform: independent of any specific hardware device, software platform, language, culture, or disability. That the Web does not become controlled by a single company -- or a single country."

The full transcript of his testimony can be found here and it is well worth a read.