Another Reason To Detest Ed Snider

(Snider is the chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, let’s not forget.)

I guess it’s appropriate that I should post today about a matter involving an Internet service provider, since I continue to deal with the consequences of connectivity that can best be described as moving at a glacial speed (slightly better over the last hour or so, though).

This post from Timothy Karr at HuffPo tells us that Comcast has been “throttling” their Internet subscribers in the following manner (from an embedded Save The Internet post)…

Service providers often slow down some types of traffic to manage flow, but Comcast is actually blocking completed files that users upload and try to share with another user. (For a detailed explanation of how this happens, visit Susan Crawford's blog.)

This practice underscores the need for clear laws ensuring an open and neutral Internet.

Save the Internet partner Public Knowledge says there is a right and a wrong way to manage traffic: “The right way is to let consumers know how much bandwidth they can use, as companies in other parts of the world do. The wrong way is to take control of a consumer’s computer to throttle their use of the network that Comcast simply doesn’t like.”

And speaking of Internet users in other parts of the world, Art Brodsky of HuffPo tells us the following from here…

In August, my wife and I went to Jasper, Alberta, a little town in the northern part of Jasper National Park. One morning, we had breakfast with a couple we had met in an excursion around the area. They are from Derby (pronounced Darby), a city of about 233,000 located in the center of England, far from London.

The discussion got around to the question, "What do you do?" For the next 45 minutes or so, my wife Liz, a systems architect for IBM, and the English husband, an engineer, and his wife, an Information Technology instructor, had a lively discussion of Service Oriented Architecture, data modeling, data warehousing and the like. I wanted to know what kind of Internet connection he had.

It was a difficult choice, he and his wife said, because there were so many options. He had to make up a spreadsheet to figure out which service was best. Let us pause and consider this concept.

This U.K. consumer did something not one U.S. consumer can do. This broadband consumer in the U.K. has so many options - 59 Internet Service Providers that he needed a spreadsheet to figure them out. Here in the U.S., a similar customer might have two - the telephone company and cable company.

The contrast is staggering: a complex spreadsheet with 59 choices and several features for each vs. pre-kindergarten math of counting to two. The evidence is clear. From the consumer point of view, our Internet policies are a failure and a disgrace.

Adherence to the principle of Net Neutrality (as noted here) would resolve most, if not all, of these difficulties. And here are the consequences if we ultimately lose Net Neutrality (from the link)…

The consequences of a world without Net Neutrality would be devastating. Innovation would be stifled, competition limited, and access to information restricted. Consumer choice and the free market would be sacrificed to the interests of a few corporate executives.

On the Internet, consumers are in ultimate control — deciding between content, applications and services available anywhere, no matter who owns the network. There's no middleman. But without Net Neutrality, the Internet will look more like cable TV. Network owners will decide which channels, content and applications are available; consumers will have to choose from their menu.

The free and open Internet brings with it the revolutionary possibility that any Internet site could have the reach of a TV or radio station. The loss of Net Neutrality would end this unparalleled opportunity for freedom of expression.

The Internet has always been driven by innovation. Web sites and services succeeded or failed on their own merit. Without Net Neutrality, decisions now made collectively by millions of users will be made in corporate boardrooms. The choice we face now is whether we can choose the content and services we want, or whether the broadband barons will choose for us.

Brodsky’s fine post lays bare the notion that our service providers ultimately care about the free flow of information and preservation of open systems necessary to encourage Internet development at the expense of profit. Worse, “throttling” is (I would argue) one tool in their arsenal to intrude on our usage and acquire information in a manner that is typical of their complicity with the Bush regime on unwarranted spying (as noted here in this fine New York Times editorial today by the novelist Studs Terkel).

Net Neutrality legislation is needed to be sure, but Brodksy outlines very well the battle plan of the telcos and the other ISPs to try and defeat it…

Accomplishing consumer choice for the Internet will be the hard part. The telephone and cable companies will spend millions to keep competition from flourishing. They will employ their in-house lobbyists and their contract lobbyists. They will deploy their fake support groups. They will trot out the racial and ethnic interest groups, which take the company money while betraying their constituencies. They will gin up dozens of papers from bought-and-paid-for academics and economists. They will contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to Congressional supporters. If they lose in Congress, they will fight in the courts and through the underbrush of implementing the FCC rules implementing a law.

And though I’m picking on Comcast here, Verizon is no better (the other ISP alternative in these parts). Any telco that would block text messages on behalf of NARAL Pro-Choice America (as noted in this link to a post about Senate Dem Byron Dorgan and Repug Olympia Snowe’s calls for hearings into the actions of AT&T and Verizon) is not to be trusted.

Actually, though, if I were the Internet provider in question in the Karr post, I wouldn’t be concerned with whether or not inhibiting the choices of its Internet users is such a “Comcastic” idea. I’d be more concerned with the fact that the company lost 65,000 Internet subscribers last quarter.