On 10/11/2008, at 1:36 AM, Jay dedman wrote: > Limiting the size of my video is NOT like polluting less with a > gasoline car. > It may be nice to keep videos small so anyone around the world can > watch it, but this is NOT a proper scientific comparison. > no it's not, and like all analogies it breaks once it's pushed. On the other hand broadband is a material infrastructure, and those cables are derived from petrochemicals, and the power we need to drive google and our server farms etc really are polluting. I mean this quite literally. (For example that source of all things accurate, wikipedia, suggests Google may use 20 megawatts and is building a huge server farm next to a hydro dam, which I think might at least be green power.) So i do mean that an attitude that treats bandwidth as not actually requiring physical resources (things to be made and powered) is akin to making motor cars with bloody big engines because oil is cheap.
> in the US, we've been spoiled by advertised unlimited bandwidth...and > now that we're taking full advantage of it, the broadband companies > are crying crocodile tears. I'm sure they are, but the point of my argument is that at some point there should be some equity in use, just because I want to do video blogging and use a lot of bandwidth does not mean that my neighbours, who use a fraction of my bandwidth, should cross subsidise me. Unless a) I can't afford it (a social democratic argument) or b) I'm recognised as a significant cultural producer so should be supported in this (as happens in a variety of western European countries, god bless 'em). > > The real issue is the relationship between broadband customers and the > broadband companies here in the US. > it is one of distrust, fear, and anger. The Comcast incident where > they just started filtering bit torrent secretly is a great example. > No conversation. That's a political argument about telecommunications policy, but doesn't change the argument that perhaps there does need to be some equity in use and cost of that use? > > > In the US, we are not talking about a situation where there are many > small broadband operators locally who talk to their customers. Sounds like here, we have two enormous telcos that dominate the internet market, the rest just pick up the scraps. > > We have 3 faceless broadband conglomerates. > If they have real limitations, then they need to open up and be > transparent. > What it feels like is a creation of "false scarcity", like the diamond > industry purposely keeping shiny shiny objects off the market to raise > their value. It might be false scarcity, though I'm pretty sure it is just bad business. The telco's think that providing content will make them money since people will pay to get this content. At this point the telco has moved from being a telco to being a media provider. Unfortunately they aren't (yet) really media companies, so their model is very old school. Buy exclusive rights and those on our network get to view it. Our networks are built on this model, with plenty of download and bugger all back channel to send data out. It physically defines us as consumers. But now everyone is using lots of data, from all over, games, video, whatever. So now they are trying to work out how to get an income stream from this, and the simplest is to charge for the data. Now, I can't speak for these companies, but as I said earlier all the data that gets moved around does get paid for, and so if big company x has agreed to pay N cents per gigabyte, and that's their business plan, this will be based on how many gigabytes their customers will use. But if the web explodes around this then their spreadsheets are screwed. Now, I provide the content over my pipes to my customers, that's a cost I control, but if these customers are now getting all this content from over there, I have to pay for that. I don't agree with this, but it is just old skool business still thinking they're in the business of shipping stuff, it's just now bits, and working out how to charge for it. I think this is a step in the right direction since now they're just thinking about data rather than product. In terms of the points at http://stopthecap.com/talking-points/ sorry, this is how most of the rest of the world has been operating from the beginning. some of the suggested rates and penalties are crazy, but I would suspect (given the United State's faith in the free market) that it will open opportunities for more sensible plans or b) if they all do the same thing I would have thought some anti-trust legislation would have kicked in? I think we should be able to get heaps of bandwidth and this infrastructure is fundamental to what this century is, I also think if you leave it to private industry then these are the problems we end up with. cheers Adrian Miles [EMAIL PROTECTED] bachelor communication honours coordinator vogmae.net.au
