Atomictumor

Came a little early today. Evidently the hotel here has a room set aside for people here for the wedding to eat breakfast in.

When I wrote about Ma Bells new plan to make providers, as well as consumers, pay for content, I figured it was some dumbass at Bellsouth or AT&T who would promptly get fired and then beat up in the parking lot with lead pipes by company thugs for making up silly ideas.  Well, turns out they’re taking it more and more seriously, and now people are starting to talk. 

The party line is that big bad Google and their likes are taking up too much of the bandwidth, and need to be charged to enjoy premium service across the lines.  Of course, they’d either drop services or charge for content, which means that whats ultimately going to happen is that you’d be paying twice for your internet, IF you want it delivered to you as you have it now.  It kindly disregards the simple fact that when you lay down your 20 (or in our case 40) bucks a month for internet it pays for ALL the internet, not just the telco’s content, or the content they approve,  or "your end" of the connection, which is a idiotic concept.  However, now they want to be paid on both ends.  I’ve talked to you about this, so if you’ve been paying attention, its nothing new.

Now, however, congressional subcommitties have been looking into it.  We caught a little bit of the action last night on C-Span (accidently) because we were mysteriously drawn into Trent Lott’s jowls.  He kept rubbing them while he pontificated on something or other, and it was like those things were made of face butter.  He couldn’t leave them alone!  My god, I thought, I need jowls like that!

However, the image of him and his jowls couldn’t change the fact that Congress has decided to remove any mention of "network neutrality" from draft rewrites of the 1996 Telecommunications Act (the one that deregulated the Telecommunications industry in order to foster competition, which still isn’t here 10 years later).  Essentally, Congress is willing to turn a blind eye to the Telco’s killing off of the internet. 

Thing is, I’m not that critical of that.  Inevitably, Congressional mucking with the internet is going to cause more problems than it solves, and with the current .gov’s tendancy to cater to big business interests, it’s doubtful that any Congressional meddling would go my way.  I’m still of the thinking that if the telco’s started going in this direction (which is unlikely, because I think that big software is currently larger and in charger than Ma Bell) there’d be such an outcry from people who are now screwed out of their Google Earth and iTunes bandwidth that the telcos would restore things to the status quo within a month or two. 

Then, however, they’d be able to bitch and moan about corsts, and would then raise their rates.  I think thats the real reason they’re doing all this.  America currently is toward the bottom of the bandwidth stack, which compared to countries like South Korea (and notice the date on that link, in 2004 they had 8 MB/second cheaper than what my 4 is today), and we pay way more for it.  What the hell is that?  True, the fact that we’re a bit more spread out may have something to do with it, but I doubt it.  I think we’re dealing with pure assed greed here. 

Speaking of greed, now that Comcast has introduced its own triple play system (TV, Phone, and Internet), it appears that all of a sudden Vonage subscribers on Comcast are having a hard time with connectivity.  Coincidence? 

Heres what I’ve got to say about this, and you can take it to the bank.  When Bellsouth and AT&T come knockin on ol’AT’s door saying "AT, buddy, we’re seeing all the bandwidth that your readers are using checking out your awesome website, and we’ve decided that we’d like to offer you ‘premium service’ for a ‘premium charge’, otherwise we can’t guarantee good service for your subscribers," I’ll have one thing to say… 

Damn right.