Dirty ISPs can sabotage the nation's digital future
My latest Guardian column, "We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage," talks about how the policy debate over "Digital Britain" has ignored the most important aspect of a digital nation: a fair deal on open network access.
But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one - not even the most experienced internet user - can determine in advance how much bandwidth they're about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you've clicked on it, chances are that you still don't know how many bytes you've consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garageEven ISPs aren't good at figuring this stuff out. Users have no intuition about their bandwidth consumption and precious little control over it.
Metering usage discourages experimentation. If you don't know whether your next click will cost you 10p or £2, you will become very conservative about your clicks. Just look at the old AOL, which charged by the minute for access, and saw that very few punters were willing to poke around the many offerings its partners had assembled on its platform. Rather, these people logged in for as short a period as possible and logged off when they were done, always hearing the clock ticking away in the background as they worked.
the latest
latest episodes
Here's the thing, though: metered usage will never be the norm. Not for very long, anyway. The moment that a market moves to metered usage across the board is the moment an upstart -- an underdog, a new provider, a new technology -- gains a competitive edge by offering what everyone wants: Unlimited, unmetered broadband.
Companies can be greedy all they want. It's just an opportunity for some other company to offer something better.
Ain't capitalism grand?
We're living in the latter days of the Internet's Golden Age. Years from now we'll look back at the early 2000's as the days when information was (mostly) free (as in speech) and Internet access was truly useful.
Unless we move to protect it, our children will grow up with the "Sony Internet" or "Disney Internet" and never the twain shall meet.
There is the flip side to the AOL example. I was an AOL member when they flipped the switch from metered usage to unlimited. I was suddenly spending as much time as I could on the service...the problem was that everyone else was too, and AOL had seriously underestimated the infrastructure they would need. There were times I couldn't get online at all because they didn't have enough phone lines available. It didn't help that the solution for some was a program that kept AOL from disconnecting you when you had gone idle, making the problem that much worse for the rest of us. Overall, it's a great example of how consumer behavior can be affected by various pricing models.
Also if my usage starts being metered, I will go on the most aggressive ad-blocking binge ever. Anything that looks even vaguely like an ad will be blocked at the source.
And I'll be a lot of other people will do the same thing, and/or people will start releasing packages to block ads and thereby save themselves from being charged for bandwidth for an ad they didn't want in the first place.
Get ready to watch ad revenue plummet across the net as click-throughs drop everywhere.
I diagree; most people don't have a good intution for how much water various activities use, but don't freak out about watering their lawns. As long as rates are reasonable, I think a metered provider could do quite well with the crowd that doesn't watch video online, especially in a market with a city-owned-and-leased infrastructure.
Hey #1 posted by Zieroh Tardy, May 19, 2009 9:01 AM
What about markets where there IS no competition for Broadband (I mean no serious competition, like 5 megabit DSL versus 10 megabit cable)
Then what?
Eugene Oregon is a great example of this, Verizon and Comcast were the only to broadband providers and Verizon couldn't even offer half of Comcast's speed. To top it off Verizon isn't even going to offer FIOS in Eugene.
How is capitalism Grand when virtual monopolies don't compete?
I think it'll be the last google that keeps the next one from getting out of the garage....
#6 By the same token, I don't have people randomly turning my water on and off (aka Internet Adds attached to web pages) and if I did, you can bet that I would be watching how much water I used and shooting people who are trying to turn my water on.
Most big ISP's will try anything that will make them money. Look at TW, they where all ready for metered usage, but luckily there was enough protest that they did not. But like game developers, they feel the need to learn things the hard way. So I expect many of the ISP's to try metered, even after they see other ISP's fail for trying it.
I disagree as well. People get charged for water and for power using a meter, and they generally don't worry about the cost of watering their lawn or turning on a lightbulb. When you buy an appliance you have no idea how much it will cost a month - but you still buy it.
The behaviour changes appear when the use becomes a significant fraction of the total bill. A 1mb web site isn't a large fraction of even a 2gb monthly plan. Taking into consideration these plans are looking at being 80gb+/month, it becomes even smaller.
I've lived with metered Internet for the past 12 years. It puts a firm price on things, and yes, it does change usage patterns. People watch their usage close to their billing date, they stop pirating videos until the billing period flips over.
However, will that kill new uses? I don't see how. For example, here in NZ, we pay US$0.75/GB of traffic (or more). It is still cheaper for me to get rid of cable/satellite TV, buy a VPN account and watch all my TV through Hulu and friends.
Metering is fine, filtering is wrong. Even QoS is wrong - my packets should be treated the same as everyone else's. You want a private network? pull another wire.
#7: You already have people randomly turning on metered services - PVRs, smart meters, anything that performs a software update. If you have freeview, even your TV (or decoder) can wake up and perform a software update over-the-air.
metering is filtering directed against the poor.
Let the market decide, only this time really make it competitive instead of a bunch of sweetheart deals between big business and corrupt government. I'll bet I would have a monopoly based on unlimited use, provided I had same access to infrastructure as the bloodsuckers.
I actually think that QoS would be great if it were voluntary--if there were some way to mark packets as high- or low-priority and be charged appropriately. I wouldn't mind buffering thirty seconds of Hulu if it meant I were charged less for the jittery bandwidth.
Tak, disregarding your grandiose and unlikely rich vs poor conspiracy theories, you're probably right.
In a competitive marketplace, ISPs would vigorously (and automagically - I'd need less than 200 lines of code) weed out the malware and viruses in order to provide a better service to customers. In the current government-mandated non-market, customer service is less important than supplying cheese steaks and blow jobs to legislators, so that's where the ISPs spend their money.
Metering is a great idea...as long as the ISP buys back the unused bandwidth each month.
We've been using metered access in Australia since the net stopped being universities only. Used to be metered for time with dialup now it is metered by GB for broadband.
Some people get shocks when they go for a "cheap" plan and discover they use much much more, but most people seem to manage. Many ISPs offer a throttling option - once you have reached your quota your speed is dropped to dialup speed.
My ISP gives me heaps of quota and charges the extra at low rates. THat there are still people who pay lots for low quota from someone like Telstra just shows that there are people who don't use that much data, and will pay for it.
@13, wait, let me guess; you're not poor?
@Anon
"In a competitive marketplace, ISPs would vigorously (and automagically - I'd need less than 200 lines of code) weed out the malware and viruses in order to provide a better service to customers."
My Monopolied Cable Internet Provider does this AND meters me. Isn't life grand?
@16, wait, let me guess;everyone gets a Porsche?
Rich vs Poor divides are there and always will be there.
I have satellite internet (worst.thing.ever) and it's metered. Well, I'm actually limited to 425mb a day, but I'd have to pay more if I wanted more bandwidth (but it caps at 500mb a day, so it's not worth it). It's the worst thing imaginable. I have to have both adblockplus and noscript. I had to cut down how many people I followed on Twitter (it ate up 20mb/hr at one point). I can't stream video or radio. I'm allowed a free download time between 2-7am, but that means that I'm using semi-legal means to watch videos and listen to music. Trust me, I've been calling the local DSL company monthly.
It's ridiculous to limit people's use of the internet. It limits the amount of people online, making it so that the people with the most money are on more than the poor. With how essential the internet today, it should be considered a right.
access to information poverty is something we choose to invent. It is NOT a necessary physical evil.
Hell, no, Takuan, I'm not poor. I started washing dishes at age 14, was digging ditches by the time I was 17, pumping gas at 19 and was a self-taught auto mechanic at 20. I got plenty of money compared to 9/10ths of the world's population.
There's no "war" on the poor. The poor don't rate enough attention for that.
If anybody in the western world gave two shits about the poor, they'd provide incentive and means for the poor to stop being poor. Don't hold your breath! The poor simply do not enter into the world of the rich at all. Except as a source of fresh hookers.
Hey, other anon, I'd take metered use if it meant I got to run any services I wanted, no filtering of legit traffic, and I didn't get 200+ attacks a day (real number there) from malware on my local segment.
Oh, well, it could be worse. I could be on COMCAST!
I've seen ONE, and ONLY ONE well done example of metering.
An internet service (the one I am using now), hooks you up for free. Want to go online? Put money in your account. When you surf, every certain amount of data going across their networks costs a certain amount of money. When you run out of money, you get no more data until you put more money on.
I don't use much internet - I went through 30 dollars one month, but usually I pay 2 or 3 dollars a month and I have to say the set up is absolutely wonderful. In addition, speed is always at max (which sort of sucks being on at prime time, but just don't do big downloads during prime time).
So for me at least, metering well done is a wonderful experience. But I've only ever met one company in the world that does it well. Ah well.
anyone know public library history? I'm sure there is a splendid quote somewhere from some landed gentry about the folly of permitting the unwashed scum free access to books.
Australia is even worse. You can't get unmetered for anything less than about AU$5000 a month. Talk about stopping the next google out of their garage.
Any entrepreneurs are forced to host in the US. Which makes a pain for physical access to your servers.
Its stupid because on one hand we have the gov going on about their "digital economy" and trying to roll out fibre to the home. On the other hand they allow Telstra to monopolies over the existing lines making it impossible to get reasonably capped or uncapped connections.
I just want to point to the net neutrality guidelines negotiated by the Norwegian Post and Telecommunications Authority (NPT) between industry and consumer organisations.
http://www.npt.no/portal/page/portal/PG_NPT_NO_EN/PAG_NPT_EN_HOME/PAG_NEWS?p_d_i=-121&p_d_c=&p_d_v=109606
I might be biased meaning these guidelines both address and handle most of the challenges outlined in this article, as i represented the consumer side in the negotiations, but still...