On 15/12/10 10:40 PM, George Bonser wrote:
From: JC Dill
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 10:20 PM
To: NANOG list
Subject: Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
On 15/12/10 10:05 PM, George Bonser wrote:
If the customer pays the cost of the transport, a provider with
better
transport efficiency / quality ratio wins.
This (and everything that followed) assumes the customer has a choice
of
providers. For most customers who already have Comcast, they don't
have
any choice for similar broadband services (speeds). So open market
principles don't come into play, and Comcast knows it.
No, you misunderstood. It doesn't matter if you have only one internet
service provider. If the end customer foots the bill, the incentive for
innovation is for the *content* provider to strike a balance between
quality and cost that the customers want. If the *content* provider
foots the bill, innovation is driven in a way that the content providers
want.
The customer *always* foots the bill in the end. It's just a matter of
how many intermediaries there are between the bill-paying customer and
the underlying service they are paying for.
Customers clearly prefer to have the true costs of services hidden and
obfuscated. Take a look at the byzantine way we pay for health care in
the US today, versus how we paid for health care 50 years ago. Then
take a look at the industry that has sprung up to wring ever more
dollars out of consumers by insulating them from the true costs of
health care. Repeat for the cost of body work on your car (paid for
with insurance, with the "quality" (and thus cost) of repair being ever
escalated because the consumer doesn't see the direct cost of the
increased repair), the quality of food production (massive poultry
houses where birds are routinely fed antibiotics and infected eggs lead
to nationwide recalls) etc. Consumers are too insulated from the
production and true costs, and don't realize how the market
consolidation is taking away their choices AND producing ever lower
quality of goods and services. Why should internet access be any different?
There was a story on NPR the other day where the talking head spoke
about how "consumers overwhelmingly want a do-not-track system".
Hello?! Consumers also don't want spam. Can you point to a SINGLE case
where CAN-SPAM actually stopped a significant amount of spam? The
reason consumers have functioning email mailboxes isn't because of
legislation stopping spam, it's because of ISPs implementing ever
increasingly effective anti-spam techniques. Anyone who thinks a "do
not track" legislation can have any possible measurable effect on how
websites track users is simply ignorant about the magnitude of the
problem, and how companies will simply outsource (ultimately to overseas
companies) their "customer tracking" services to avoid needing to comply
with any US laws. And how can the consumer know if their "do not track"
request is being honored anyway? It's not like they get a popup every
time a website tracks their activities.
What customers *really* want, and what they gladly accept as long as it
saves them a few pennies, are miles apart. (Which is why so many people
blindly give their data to Facebook etc.) This is why I think the
direction Comcast is going is ultimately going to win in the
marketplace. Do I *want* to see Comcast win? No! But I think it's an
inevitable trend. Customers are lazy. Customers are cheap. They will
- en masse - support the lowest cost solution that *appears* to give
them something of value, even when it's really not in their best interest.
jc
