[Sosfbay-discuss] The End of the Internet?

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

>From: Andrea Dorey <andid at cagreens.org>
>Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 19:06:30 -0800
>To: Green South Bay Discussion <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
>X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.623)
>Subject: Re: [Sosfbay-discuss] The End of the Internet?

>Cameron,
>What about what Metrofi and others are doing in Cupertino, Sunnyvale, 
>and Santa Clara (not to mention SF, etc.!) by putting up transmitters 
>and telling people that access is FREE?

Yahoo has been telling people email accounts are "free"
for a decade.  Businessmen are always telling people that
things that cost money are "free."  And when you tell people
things they want to hear, they believe it.
Of course, Yahoo Mail isn't free at all.  The advertisers
pay for it.  Yahoo is selling space on your screen,
and your time to download the ads, to advertisers.

If Metrofi can find someone to pay for access, then it
won't charge the users for access.  And what will happen
is 1% of the users will download movies and music all the
time and create 99.9% of the traffic.  Same as what happens
on all the other ways consumers reach the Internet.
Maybe Metrofi will go out of business.  Maybe Metrofi will
decide to charge those 1% of users some kind of
high volume fee.  I think that would be fair.  If Metrofi
decided to charge everybody the same, that would be less
fair.  The light users would be subsidizing the heavy users.

Obviously Metrofi has a business plan that says the money
is going to come from somewhere.


> My house in Sunnyvale is 280 
>feet from one of those transmitters, or so I've been told by Metrofi.  
>What do you expect will happen in future?

I think there will be more than one Internet, and the
connections between them will be restricted.
It's already happening to the public email system.
There's the original, professionally and cooperatively
managed system, and there is a new, lower cost system
where most of the consumers are, that is relatively
poorly run.

This will happen because the consumer service business
model is nothing like the professional or business to
business model.  The consumer model is like television,
where the advertisers are the real customer, and access
to the consumers is the product.  That Internet is
going to get more and more like television, and like
a mail order catalog and a shopping mall.  The whole
reason it was built was to sell stuff.  And if you
want to communicate with consumers through it, then
you are an advertiser and you will have to pay the
owner (or the hijacker, if you prefer) of the medium.
That's how television broadcasting
works.  It's how postal junk mail works.  Of course,
consumers aren't willing to pay much
to be advertised to.  They like it better if you tell
them it's "free."  And it doesn't seem to bother
consumers that they have almost no control over it.
As long as it's really pretty, and easy to use, and
you keep telling them they're "secure."

The original Internet will carry on, with the users
paying for their use, since the Congress stopped paying
for the thing in 1989 or something.  There will be
considerable expense in guarding the gateways
between the two systems so the professional Internet
isn't flooded with garbage from the consumer Internet.
In fact, there already is.

The two networks will run side by side over the
same wires, at least for a while.


> Will the "free" go away?

It always does.  Perhaps Metrofi will find a way to
charge you through the property or sales taxes you pay.
Maybe they'll put you on the consumer Internet "for free"
but you'll have to pay for a business grade service.

Cameron



>Andrea

>On Feb 4, 2006, at 10:58 AM, Cameron L. Spitzer wrote:
>>
>> But that doesn't mean bandwidth is free.  We're just
>> not paying for it right now.  (Routers and the staff
>> to manage them and the fortresses they live in
>> turn out to be the big cost.)  The telcos are locked
>> in a price war with the cable TV companies,
>> charging less than cost for residential broadband
>> and the network behind it.  They're looking for a
>> way to end that price war.  You're gonna have to
>> pay something approaching the cost for movie downloads
>> and podcasts and voice over IP.  Good.  It won't be
>> True Cost Pricing, but it will be more real than the
>> free bandwidth fantasy we're living in now.
>>
>> Cameron
>>