Keep the Internet Open
&gt; There&#x27;s an argument that Internet Service Providers should be able to charge a metered rate based on usage.<p>For home Utilities, this is based on the fact that, indeed, your usage pattern is a couple of things<p>1) In the best of Utility markets, electricity has no real elasticity. Electrical demand is a constant game of just simply keep pace with existing demand as much as possible. There is no excess capacity problems per say, as the game is trying to be as efficient as possible.<p>2) For the most part, people&#x27;s usage patterns are routinely predicable and stable, so the demand cost associated can be metered reasonably and with <i>relative</i> transparency (Not to say, its completely transparent, because its not, though its very well regulated in comparison to say, internet service access &amp; quality). This allows a relatively consistent and low variable cost of delivery of this service, however its not a &#x27;fixed&#x27; cost, with the exception usually of the wiring the house itself to the grid.<p>3) The device in which a home uses, in fact, can be measured in absolute terms. For instance, your appliances can be calculated to the letter how much they will cost to run (see here, for instance: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelbluejay.com&#x2F;electricity&#x2F;cost.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelbluejay.com&#x2F;electricity&#x2F;cost.html</a>). I would argue that this is not true of internet usage, which can vary EXTREMELY widely. The EIA gives a nice summary on this too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;energyexplained&#x2F;index.cfm?page=electricity_used" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;energyexplained&#x2F;index.cfm?page=electrici...</a><p>Now, often people will say, reasonably, that in an environment maintained much like the power utilities, if things could be achieved to this level of usage&#x2F;monitoring&#x2F;charging for use would make sense. Transparent pricing, easy ways to calculate usage based on the app or app(s) or some other methodology for chunking the pricing structure so its really transparent and stable to price out a month to month usage pattern for the average person. Sounds cool right? Well, here is some notable differences:<p>(As an aside, for fun, imagine a world where the app had to tell you how much on average it cost to use for an hour on a metered connection, like how energy star rated appliances tell you their yearly cost)<p>Broadband is a completely different story<p>1) Wired service has a fixed cost and tons of excess capacity. The cost, while not <i>cheap</i> is fixed, per house or neighborhood, and that infrastructure doesn&#x27;t have to be changed out for many years, in some cases a decade or more. Once the wired service has been installed to a house, thats it. the ISP then can flip the service on and start delivering product to the homes at virtually no cost after that. There is no ongoing &#x27;generation&#x27; of bandwidth to closely meet demand. The technology itself, after all, takes care of all that. All the ISP has to do is run the ship smoothly, but they don&#x27;t have to build a new bandwidth power plant to make more bandwidth.<p>2) Which leads me to my second point. There is a ton of bandwidth in the system already. WE know this. The system not only has a fixed cost, but the actual capacity of the wired services being deployed already have a ton of extra bandwidth capacity, in particular if we are talking about home users. From DSL Reports <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dslreports.com&#x2F;shownews&#x2F;Deconstructing-The-Exaflood-Myth-97440" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dslreports.com&#x2F;shownews&#x2F;Deconstructing-The-Exafl...</a> we get this great line (i encourage everyone to read the full report):<p><i>Andrew Odlyzko is one of the nation&#x27;s top experts on global Internet traffic. Stationed at the University of Minnesota, Odlyzko posts all of his data to his website, and notes that while growth is strong, it doesn&#x27;t necessitate drastic new pricing model shifts (metered billing), or wailing to the heavens about the dire menace that is P2P traffic. &quot;There is not a single sign of an unmanageable flood of traffic,&quot; Odlyzko says. &quot;If anything, a slowdown is visible more than a speedup,&quot; he says</i><p>And thats just from 2008, and the situation for bandwidth excess capacity has actually improved:<p>Tech Dirt reports from 2012 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20130118&#x2F;17425221736&#x2F;cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20130118&#x2F;17425221736&#x2F;cable...</a>):<p>The relevant bit, in response to a Michael Powell, a cable industry lobbyist:<p><i>If usage caps were about &quot;fairness,&quot; carriers would offer the nation&#x27;s grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like &quot;fairness&quot; to you?</i><p>Even as far back as 2008, they tried to push the bandwidth hog myth (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dslreports.com&#x2F;shownews&#x2F;The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-Myth-117230" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dslreports.com&#x2F;shownews&#x2F;The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-M...</a>):<p>relevant quote:<p><i>Assuming that if disruptive users exist (which, as mentioned above we could not prove) they would be amongst those that populate the top 1% of bandwidth users during peak periods. To test this theory, we crossed that population with users that are over cap (simulating AT&amp;T’s established data caps) and found out that only 78% of customers over cap are amongst the top 1%, which means that one fifth of customers being punished by the data cap policy cannot possibly be considered to be disruptive (even assuming that the remaining four fifths are).
Data caps, therefore, are a very crude and unfair tool when it comes to targeting potentially disruptive users. The correlation between real-time bandwidth usage and data downloaded over time is weak and the net cast by data caps captures users that cannot possibly be responsible for congestion. Furthermore, many users who are &quot;as guilty&quot; as the ones who are over cap (again, if there is such a thing as a disruptive user) are not captured by that same net.</i><p>Also see this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publicknowledge.org&#x2F;news-blog&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;myth-bandwidth-hog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publicknowledge.org&#x2F;news-blog&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;myth-bandwid...</a><p>3) [Opinion piece here]: Fair and open internet access is in my mind, is going to become a first amendment issue, or at least should be treated as one. The growth and power of being able to be seen, heard, and read on the internet is quickly, as we all know, supplanting most if not all other forms of media. And for the media it is enabling, other mediums that carry forward, like video, are quickly consolidating onto the internet in great numbers. This makes it <i>the</i> place for public speech. While the space may be non-physical (virtual), the ability for ISPs to pick winners and losers to access will have inevitably terrible political and economic consequences, and not just for start ups. Imagine if employees who got cancer from working in an industrial facility could not publish their stories to say, Medium, because a large ISP like Comcast will refuse to carry medium&#x27;s traffic in and around that issue, or at all, if it becomes a hot bed for other interests that are willing to pay vast sums of money to filter that traffic from ever being delivered or surfacing. Does this sound farfetched? I don&#x27;t think so. We know groups have tried to do this with newspapers in the past, and of course groups have also tried to do things like pressure individual websites from publishing things to. If you open the internet and mandate its traffic is treated equally regardless, it largely negates the ability for this to happen on that level, as in an ideal implementation, the ISPs would be stripped (and monitored to ensure) that they aren&#x27;t reading <i>any</i> traffic in the wild that they don&#x27;t have an <i>explicit</i> reason to do so (Say, a warrant to tap into a connection of a suspected murder looking at their network traffic or something)<p>4) While we are talking about this, there is no damn spectrum crunch either, its a nice myth that wireless carriers&#x2F;ISPs are using to justify their underhanded tactics here, because physics dictates there <i>can</i> be a spectrum crunch. that doesn&#x27;t mean there <i>is</i> or <i>soon will be</i> a spectrum crunch:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20130118&#x2F;17425221736&#x2F;cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20130118&#x2F;17425221736&#x2F;cable...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dslreports.com&#x2F;shownews&#x2F;The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-Myth-117230" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dslreports.com&#x2F;shownews&#x2F;The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-M...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigaom.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-myth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigaom.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-myth&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigaom.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;the-myth-of-the-wireless-spectrum-crisis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigaom.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;the-myth-of-the-wireless-spect...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;507486&#x2F;the-spectrum-crunch-that-wasnt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;507486&#x2F;the-spectrum-crunc...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidauthority.com&#x2F;wireless-industry-flipped-business-model-3-myths-407068&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidauthority.com&#x2F;wireless-industry-flipped-bu...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;wireless&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20121004&#x2F;02434820589&#x2F;now-that-we-know-telcos-exaggerated-about-spectrum-crunch-how-about-some-more-open-spectrum.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;wireless&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20121004&#x2F;024...</a>