Tastefully Odd Blog Entries

I was watching football on espn the other night and saw this commercial propaganda from the NCTA during the commercials. As one of the tags to this post implies, it got under my skin.

They want me to make me think those multi-billion dollar silicon valley companies are the bad guys? Ha! They can’t hold a candle to the amount of hatred I have for cable companies. They can’t hope to compete with communications companies for the scum bags of the year award. For one thing, they earned their billions by offering useful services on a neutral internet. Unlike cable and telephone companies who are able to sit on their territorial monopolies and treat their customers like serfs in their fiefdom, these internet companies could lose their position at any time to an newcomer with a better service. I’ll pay more for their services with net neutrality? What? Net neutrality means the internet stays the way it is. The content/service providers pay for their bandwidth and I pay for mine and the networks inbetween handle the data the same regardless of whether it’s for a big corporate website or a small blog. The companies against net neutrality want to set up tiered access and discriminate against those who don’t pay their fee. Either google would pay isp’s to ensure a higher quality of service (higher in comparison to sites that don’t pay this extortion fee; this premium service would likely be close to how fast/reliable it currently is today as I don’t see how they would be able to improve it vastly) or isp’s would charge users more to access certain sites (kinda like premium channels except it doesn’t cost the isp more to access certain sites whereas HBO charges cable companies more to show its content) or both. Right now, anyone can visit my blog and access it as fast as the network will allow. If isp’s are allowed to discriminate, it’s likely that people won’t be able to access my site reliably or possibly not at all. The next google/amazon/etc. would never be able to get off the ground because it would be inferior in speed to the established sites who can afford to pay the extortion money. Google, amazon, et. al. could side with the cable companies and (big) baby bells and shut out potential future competitors, but they don’t. And although their stance could partly be for other selfish reasons I think it’s important to point this out as it is in stark contrast to NCTA’s propaganda.

So no, google, amazon, et. al. don’t want to subsidize their customers’ connections because cable and phone companies sold bandwidth they didn’t have for less than it costs them to increase the size of their customer base. You got it into people’s heads that they can get broadband for dirt cheap and now you’ve got to live with the hemmoraging until your costs go down or man up and find a price point where you’re making money.

using the bandwidth that I paid for… ain’t I a stinker?