Cap This
ATT will likely impose transfer limits on its consumer Internet service plans. This is a fundamental change in the way we now navigate the Internet yet PR flacks are striving mightily to deny it, insisting any caps will be so high most users won’t even be aware of them, let alone “inconvenienced.”
If these proposed limits seem impossibly generous to anyone who still thinks the internet is merely the electronic equivalent of a pneumatic mail tube rest assured they are actually quite stingy for todays file sharers, and as regular users find themselves mulling over what it means to them - while watching and uploading more and more video – they’ll soon run up against limited service and discover it’s no bargain.
If ATT was fair it would allow unused gigs to "rollover" and count towards subscribers’ maxed out months. Fair doesn't exactly seem to be the word that comes to mind here however, not if the steady drumbeat of accusatory statements from executives are any indication.
The other day the head of ATT showed his gift for the obvious when he said something to the effect that “network upgrades aren’t free,” grumpily sounding as if people were somehow swiping his company’s lines. Note to head: I’m paying $100.00 a month for your fastest data and phone subscriptions so cut the baloney. My service is 95% slower than Japan’s NTT and it’s costing me more. Where’s all the money going anyway?
I’m hearing there really isn't a physical bandwidth crunch among the big operators - especially on DSL. Maximizing profits without having to upgrade infrastructure – the holy grail for shareholders – is always a coveted benefit of course and they harp endlessly about the impossibility of building their way out of congestion, self-serving nonsense when you offer the slowest speeds in the western world certainly, but this appears to be only one motivating factor. More relevant I think is curbing competition between the ISPs and their own customers – file sharers in other words. Monopolizing content delivery to favor ATT's own nascent attempts at paid programming - by shutting out swappers - is probably the ultimate reason behind this, but I don’t want to keep singling out ATT because that wouldn’t be fair. Or balanced. So I’ll spread the blame a little. Time-Warner cable has begun instituting caps in selected markets and by now everyone’s heard about Comcast’s ham fisted traffic shaping public relations disaster. Even if cable has technical issues that fiber telcos like Verizon don’t have to deal with, Comcast has gotten some well deserved heat for shutting down peer-to-peer as opposed to balancing load in a more neutral fashion, and again we’re seeing this behavior at the cable companies for probably the same reasons ATT keeps threatening it: fighting their own customers for delivery slots.
If ISPs wanted to do the most for their customer base they’d continually invest in expanding physical capacity, much like the rest of the world does. This would help them in the long run and it would aid America in her perennial economic competition with other nations. Granted this takes some work. If they’d like to do as little as possible ISPs could at least let customers rollover unused gigabytes or allow credits for under-use. Unfortunately that’s too much trouble as well. It turns out the companies want to do nothing. Well, nothing positive for subscribers at any rate. Take their money, cap, end of deal. Customer gets less, company gets more.
In case you’re wondering what the big deal is if caps are so high, never lowered (unlikely) and you don’t ever bump into them except in the rarest of circumstances it’s simple: any limits at any level kills file-sharing, and does it more effectively than any legal strategies yet devised. Here’s why: A cap decimates the uploader base, and without uploaders, you know, the guys with the stuff, content drys up and that means you can’t download. Oops. It is the single most effective way to kill P2P and that’s the point. Overnight we’re back to the US mail.
In areas where users are in monopoly or duopoly markets, and that is just about everywhere in the US today, switching providers isn’t viable or effective. About the only thing subscribers can do to pressure ISPs is to quit the service entirely and say goodbye to the internet. Tough medicine indeed, all the more so because most groups won’t participate in any kind of strike or boycott if it means even a minor disruption in their lifestyle. Take for example the universally loathed RIAA, they’re still around after suing thousands of people because somebody is still supporting member record companies (bad somebody. Bad). But grass roots economic pressure must be brought to bear on these companies if relief won’t come from elsewhere, like Washington. Truth be told we’re on our own here.
Luckily there is a way out of this (this is the internet after all. There’s always a way.) It’s a simple solution in print if somewhat awkward socially but it’s workable and most importantly if applied on a large scale it will be brutally effective against even the most entrenched and unresponsive ISPs. It’s a tactic I’m thinking of calling NodeShare.
The idea is to get together with four neighbors and create a single shared service for all five users. Using a good wireless router and common password the group will run a shared local node using the fastest service plan among them. My telco for instance sells me 5 megs down (actual) for $35.00 a month. It’s not going to impress a Tokyo surfer but it’s the fastest they have and it’s rare I max it out. If I shared the node with four other friends I’d still have on average 1 meg down. Not great but I lived with that for years and filled a few hard drives. Moreover my slice of the bill would be $7.00 which is less than I ever paid for anything, even dial up. The savings actually would top $300.00 in a year. That’s not bad, even if it’s not the point. Once the fastest plan in the group is identified and NodeShare is running, the other four members with slower or equal service can cancel their accounts the moment caps are introduced, making sure to tell customer service it’s in response to the new limits. This means the ISP sees an immediate drop in revenue of 80% per group wherever they cap. An across the board drop in income so devastating the threat alone could be enough to keep caps from happening. It’s so scary it can change policy, including ironically, any TOS on service sharing.
Some subscribers are in markets where download speeds are much greater than mine, up to five to ten times greater, and in such areas any individual NodeShare branch would have that much more capacity, twice as much even as my unshared line has right now. No reason not to have ten members then. They’d be way ahead, especially with the cost savings, a real win-win for those lucky strikers. Of course some areas have speeds slower than mine so those nodes would require finessing, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize here. The goal is to influence corporate decisions we normally have no direct influence over, despite the fact that in the aggregate we support the entire structure and should, by this right, have total control. Capping will do more harm to file sharing than anything tried so far. Anything that can be done to prevent or postpone it short of insurrection should be attempted.
Since the 1990s sharing has changed just about everything distributable by copy, and that means just about all media, from film and music to TV and print. That it happened in a mostly ad-hoc and undirected fashion is all the more fascinating. We didn’t coalesce and organize. We didn’t get up one day and decide. We just…did. The growth was messy, halting and unmanaged but overwhelmingly effective nonetheless. These last ten years have been wonderful for millions of people, due in large part to the freewheeling nature of the Internet. That past however won’t be the best guide in our coming confrontation with the ISPs. It’s going to take a lot of directed effort to win this one. Nothing we can’t handle mind you but it will require a little social finesse, a few chats across the backyard fence, a few burgers, a few beverages. Old fashioned elbow rubbing and new fangled social networking. A slam dunk? Piece of cake? Walk in the park? Maybe not, but if enough people pull this off so that even ten percent pull out of markets when ISPs attempt capping I think we’ll have an effective movement and a sustainable future for peer-to-peer.
- js.
ATT will likely impose transfer limits on its consumer Internet service plans. This is a fundamental change in the way we now navigate the Internet yet PR flacks are striving mightily to deny it, insisting any caps will be so high most users won’t even be aware of them, let alone “inconvenienced.”
If these proposed limits seem impossibly generous to anyone who still thinks the internet is merely the electronic equivalent of a pneumatic mail tube rest assured they are actually quite stingy for todays file sharers, and as regular users find themselves mulling over what it means to them - while watching and uploading more and more video – they’ll soon run up against limited service and discover it’s no bargain.
If ATT was fair it would allow unused gigs to "rollover" and count towards subscribers’ maxed out months. Fair doesn't exactly seem to be the word that comes to mind here however, not if the steady drumbeat of accusatory statements from executives are any indication.
The other day the head of ATT showed his gift for the obvious when he said something to the effect that “network upgrades aren’t free,” grumpily sounding as if people were somehow swiping his company’s lines. Note to head: I’m paying $100.00 a month for your fastest data and phone subscriptions so cut the baloney. My service is 95% slower than Japan’s NTT and it’s costing me more. Where’s all the money going anyway?
I’m hearing there really isn't a physical bandwidth crunch among the big operators - especially on DSL. Maximizing profits without having to upgrade infrastructure – the holy grail for shareholders – is always a coveted benefit of course and they harp endlessly about the impossibility of building their way out of congestion, self-serving nonsense when you offer the slowest speeds in the western world certainly, but this appears to be only one motivating factor. More relevant I think is curbing competition between the ISPs and their own customers – file sharers in other words. Monopolizing content delivery to favor ATT's own nascent attempts at paid programming - by shutting out swappers - is probably the ultimate reason behind this, but I don’t want to keep singling out ATT because that wouldn’t be fair. Or balanced. So I’ll spread the blame a little. Time-Warner cable has begun instituting caps in selected markets and by now everyone’s heard about Comcast’s ham fisted traffic shaping public relations disaster. Even if cable has technical issues that fiber telcos like Verizon don’t have to deal with, Comcast has gotten some well deserved heat for shutting down peer-to-peer as opposed to balancing load in a more neutral fashion, and again we’re seeing this behavior at the cable companies for probably the same reasons ATT keeps threatening it: fighting their own customers for delivery slots.
If ISPs wanted to do the most for their customer base they’d continually invest in expanding physical capacity, much like the rest of the world does. This would help them in the long run and it would aid America in her perennial economic competition with other nations. Granted this takes some work. If they’d like to do as little as possible ISPs could at least let customers rollover unused gigabytes or allow credits for under-use. Unfortunately that’s too much trouble as well. It turns out the companies want to do nothing. Well, nothing positive for subscribers at any rate. Take their money, cap, end of deal. Customer gets less, company gets more.
In case you’re wondering what the big deal is if caps are so high, never lowered (unlikely) and you don’t ever bump into them except in the rarest of circumstances it’s simple: any limits at any level kills file-sharing, and does it more effectively than any legal strategies yet devised. Here’s why: A cap decimates the uploader base, and without uploaders, you know, the guys with the stuff, content drys up and that means you can’t download. Oops. It is the single most effective way to kill P2P and that’s the point. Overnight we’re back to the US mail.
In areas where users are in monopoly or duopoly markets, and that is just about everywhere in the US today, switching providers isn’t viable or effective. About the only thing subscribers can do to pressure ISPs is to quit the service entirely and say goodbye to the internet. Tough medicine indeed, all the more so because most groups won’t participate in any kind of strike or boycott if it means even a minor disruption in their lifestyle. Take for example the universally loathed RIAA, they’re still around after suing thousands of people because somebody is still supporting member record companies (bad somebody. Bad). But grass roots economic pressure must be brought to bear on these companies if relief won’t come from elsewhere, like Washington. Truth be told we’re on our own here.
Luckily there is a way out of this (this is the internet after all. There’s always a way.) It’s a simple solution in print if somewhat awkward socially but it’s workable and most importantly if applied on a large scale it will be brutally effective against even the most entrenched and unresponsive ISPs. It’s a tactic I’m thinking of calling NodeShare.
The idea is to get together with four neighbors and create a single shared service for all five users. Using a good wireless router and common password the group will run a shared local node using the fastest service plan among them. My telco for instance sells me 5 megs down (actual) for $35.00 a month. It’s not going to impress a Tokyo surfer but it’s the fastest they have and it’s rare I max it out. If I shared the node with four other friends I’d still have on average 1 meg down. Not great but I lived with that for years and filled a few hard drives. Moreover my slice of the bill would be $7.00 which is less than I ever paid for anything, even dial up. The savings actually would top $300.00 in a year. That’s not bad, even if it’s not the point. Once the fastest plan in the group is identified and NodeShare is running, the other four members with slower or equal service can cancel their accounts the moment caps are introduced, making sure to tell customer service it’s in response to the new limits. This means the ISP sees an immediate drop in revenue of 80% per group wherever they cap. An across the board drop in income so devastating the threat alone could be enough to keep caps from happening. It’s so scary it can change policy, including ironically, any TOS on service sharing.
Some subscribers are in markets where download speeds are much greater than mine, up to five to ten times greater, and in such areas any individual NodeShare branch would have that much more capacity, twice as much even as my unshared line has right now. No reason not to have ten members then. They’d be way ahead, especially with the cost savings, a real win-win for those lucky strikers. Of course some areas have speeds slower than mine so those nodes would require finessing, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize here. The goal is to influence corporate decisions we normally have no direct influence over, despite the fact that in the aggregate we support the entire structure and should, by this right, have total control. Capping will do more harm to file sharing than anything tried so far. Anything that can be done to prevent or postpone it short of insurrection should be attempted.
Since the 1990s sharing has changed just about everything distributable by copy, and that means just about all media, from film and music to TV and print. That it happened in a mostly ad-hoc and undirected fashion is all the more fascinating. We didn’t coalesce and organize. We didn’t get up one day and decide. We just…did. The growth was messy, halting and unmanaged but overwhelmingly effective nonetheless. These last ten years have been wonderful for millions of people, due in large part to the freewheeling nature of the Internet. That past however won’t be the best guide in our coming confrontation with the ISPs. It’s going to take a lot of directed effort to win this one. Nothing we can’t handle mind you but it will require a little social finesse, a few chats across the backyard fence, a few burgers, a few beverages. Old fashioned elbow rubbing and new fangled social networking. A slam dunk? Piece of cake? Walk in the park? Maybe not, but if enough people pull this off so that even ten percent pull out of markets when ISPs attempt capping I think we’ll have an effective movement and a sustainable future for peer-to-peer.
- js.
posted by JackSpratts at 9:08 AM
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