The executive heads of three Australian internet service providers have categorized Net Neutrality as a distinctly American problem. At the core of it, they say, is years of unlimited access. If that sounds vastly oversimplified, you’re absolutely right.
In a sense, so the arguments of Simon Hackett and Justin Milne go, American subscribers have been spoiled by flat rate unlimited access plans. With the advent of torrents and YouTube and other video or rich media providers, unlimited access business models are suffering. Without a tiered pricing model of some kind—where either consumers or providers (or both) pay for extra bandwidth—ISPs lack the funds necessary to upgrade their networks.
“Now everybody file-shares and sends video all around the place,” Milne told ZDNet, “and the problem for the telcos in the U.S. is they are having to expand their networks as they go, but they are not getting paid any more money.”
Australian ISPs weren’t so foolish to think making the customer that happy was a good idea.
The executives appear to be making the case for the collapse of an all-you-can-eat buffet model. Buffets are profitable because the amount of food people can eat varies greatly. Some eat a lot, some don’t, and it all balances out. If everybody gorged, then watch buffets across the country fold or be forced to charge a la carte.
This would be the reasoning behind Time Warner’s experiment with metered pricing and Comcast’s imposition of bandwidth caps.
Too bad the buffet model is stocked with nothing but baloney.
It’s not unreasonable to be suspicious of ISP executive motives for coming down on a particular side of this debate. Objectivity would seem the natural impression, as, at least by appearance, Australian ISPs don’t have a dog in the American Net Neutrality fight. It’s hard to tell what their individual investments are, but Milne is taking his ISP straight into the media delivery future. As the boundaries between global industries and companies blur, these guys, likely, are looking to back the right financial horse, and keep their own constituents expectations low—otherwise, why say anything about it?
The buffet argument is based on finite goods. Before coming down on the side of eliminating unlimited access, Hackett disputes the idea that there is any capacity problem. “Optical fiber basically doesn’t run out of capacity, it’s just a question of how fast you blink the bits at each end,” he said. Still, controlling that infinity seems to him a good idea. What ISP wouldn’t think so?
So Hackett obliterates the argument that capacity is in jeopardy, but still comes down on the side of metered pricing as a business model. He justifies that by making it a cost issue where the ISP must provide extra bandwidth but doesn’t get compensated enough for it to build out the network so extra bandwidth can be provided.
That’s all well and good in Australia, perhaps. But in America, where supposedly this Net Neutrality issue isolated and perpetuated by spoiled consumers, and where telcos have treated Washington like their very own money buffets, that argument isn’t going to fly.
At what point, I wonder, was charging 40 times bandwidth for internet connections (7,000 times cost in the case of text message, now 14,000 times after recent hikes), accepting $200 billion from Congress for network build-out, and quarter after quarter of great profitability from unlimited access, not enough to support adding the necessary bandwidth for the heavy downloading of just 5 percent of Internet users?
The ISPs want us to feel sorry for them because they have to spend a little of the money they’ve gouged us for to upgrade their networks. Well, boo frickin’ hoo. I say give us our $200 billion back (we kinda need it at the moment) and then maybe we’ll talk. The network was supposed to have been able to support this rich media traffic two years ago—what a coincidence, just as rich media was becoming popular.
So because of greed—again—US ISPs offer laughable speeds in comparison to the rest of the world, and block in earnest any attempts of the people to lay their own fiber, and they expect us to look the other way and trust them when it comes to controlling the content when see?
Yeah, right.
They are right in one sense that Net Neutrality is uniquely an American problem. In the Netherlands and Japan, where they have speeds we spoiled American consumers can only watch from afar like it’s some kind of digital NASCAR race, the government hasn’t allowed telcos to manipulate the broadband market. That is, for sure, a uniquely American problem.
And if Australia’s not careful, it’ll be their problem, too.
