‘The End of the Internet?’: E-book community should beware of phone/cable-biz plan
Here, from the Nation.com. Excerpt from Jeff Chester’s article:
The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to help win the freedom to impose this new broadband business model. At a recent conference held by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other media companies, there was much discussion of a plan for phone companies to impose fees on a sliding scale, charging content providers different levels of service. “Price discrimination,” noted PFF’s resident media expert Adam Thierer, “drives the market-based capitalist economy.”
Even by the most doggedly capitalistic standards, however, the PFF approach would be clueless.
The new proposal is actually a threat to technological progress since it would reduce the incentive for the creation of additional bandwidth and of new technologies to make better use of it. What’s more, discriminatory pricing would harm small startups, which have created much of the Net’s wealth. And guess what? Turns out that Verizon and other telcos can themselves can be bandwidth hogs. Meanwhile they’re dead set on gouging not just consumers but also publishers, other content providers and services such as Google.
I hope that publishers groups will join others in warning against the PFF recommendations. What happens when e-books appears with embedded multimedia, an actual capability that OpenReader will allow? The higher bandwidth requirements will just compound the problem. What AT&T and the rest want is a transfer of wealth from the rest of us to their shareholders. I see nothing wrong with fair charges for Internet use, but let’s stick to the flat-price model, which so far has served the Net so well.
No, this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned the threat, and I may well be returning to the topic again. Oh, and don’t think you’re safe just because you live outside the United States. You can bet that telecom cartels and related industries elsewhere will be trying these same tactics.
Related: Techdirt story telling how promo plans from AT&T and others mask high prices for DSL.
(Via Roger Sperberg.)
February 3rd, 2006 at 7:59 am
[...] After stumbling into an article of David Rothman about a biz-plan of some media/cable providers, I have been thinking about the implications of a multi-level charging plan for content. I also have to agree with him, that this might be pure greed by the bandwidth providers. [...]