Time Warner Seeks to Destroy the Internet

Like a cartoon villain, Time Warner has enacted a devious plan that promises to destroy something that brings joy to the people like you and I. If you haven't heard about this yet, Time Warner has begun testing a tiered system where they charge you by both the speed and total amount of bites you operate at in a month. If you aren't feeling outrage right now, then you don't understand what I just said.

Time Warner is attempting to take advantage of the average person's ignorance of how computers and the Internet operate by manipulating ambiguities in language to make it seem like there is somehow a finite amount of Internet out there. When operating under that vague understanding of resource use that is so obvious in the physical world, it seems reasonable that they would want to charge us for how much of something we use. The thing is that this is a deception. There is not a finite amount of internets out there that one day we might us up much like we might one day use up all the oil. There are just limits on how much can be delivered to a certain number of users at any given moment. Which is why the erroneous "tubes" analogy is so attractive.

It is helpful to think of this from the end of the ISP. Faced with the need to consistently upgrade their capacity to handle many more and more customers at the faster and faster speeds that are needed to run the more and more intensive operations we perform over the Internet the ISP decides, not that the costs will one day become prohibitive(because as the Wired graph shows, that simply isn't true. And simple logic tells you that if they faced a problem of overhead they could simply raise their rates. They are the cable company after all), but that since this technical reality creates users of different needs, using a different metric vastly changes your rate structure and you can balloon your revenue.

The simple capitalist, free market logic is obvious here. Where you have a monopoly in your individual markets you can charge whatever you want. Since most regions of the country are serviced by a single cable company or ISP they can all do this without fear of being out competed by the numerous other companies out there. The only customers that will be spared are those that live in competitive markets. And sure enough ATT has started testing this idea out themselves. Now Comcast, the big villains of the last bandwidth war are looking competitive because all they have is a cap.

The slightly less obvious reason that is highly compelling for a cable company to do something sinister like this is that they are a cable company. They are primarily in the business of offering TV entertainment and people going over to the Internet to get their shows whenever they want(even their own customers) deprives them of a customer for their other services, and of ad revenue since people are having difficulty finding satisfying advertising solutions on the Internet. Largely because you have accurate measures of how effective your ads are on the Internet where they are cheap, but have to pay top dollar for television ads that are widely believed to be entirely ineffective.

The tiered structure is basically Time Warner punishing online gamers and online movie watchers for getting their entertainment elsewhere.

The tiers are also very low. Or at least in the way we measure Internet use anymore. Time Warner points out that their first tier, 1G, satisfies the needs of a third of their customers. These are basically the people that don't use the Internet. I admit that these people will probably pay less for the same amount of Internet. Anything above your grandmas Internet use enters an onerous tiered system where you pay for each gigabyte you use. In a month.

Apart from the possibility of viruses and malware using Internet without your consent and beyond your control, this is an attack on the basic philosophy that has led to the Internet and computer use as we know it. We all converted over to cable Internet because it was fast and primarily because we didn't have to pay for every minute of Internet use through a dedicated phone line. It freed up so much of the initial cost barrier of the Internet and increased the speed to the point where it became the multi-media communications tool it had always promised to be. This type of Internet service created the concept of the computer as the always-on, always-connected Internet terminal. This philosophy of the personal computer is central to the way we think of computer use and central to how software operates. Going back to a tiered structure where one pays based on an almost arbitrary metric is an attack, an attack based in greed, but an attack on the philosophy that was foundational to Web 2.0. We will never be able to proceed to Web 3.0 with this albatross around our necks.

That is where monopolies hurt business. Even regional ones. This was a lesson we learned around the last great depression and hopefully with a Democratic congress it is not a lesson we will have to re-learn the hard way. There is at least one Congressman trying to fight back. He has proposed the interesting philosophical change of calling the Internet a utility. I like that. If phone service was essential to daily life enough to be called a utility then the Internet is as well.

You should write to your representatives at the state and federal level. Raising Cain on the Internet will only go so far to produce resistance to this move by Time Warner and Ma Bell. You have to get the honest perspective of the people to the government before the industry twists the story.

It's easy to question the validity of an economic argument that relies on the business generation of the Internet. If you are a moron, or have been living in a cave since 1990. It is easy to point out that many small businesses and individuals have been able to expand their sales and start new businesses because of the low overhead cost of the Internet and its ability to reach an international consumer base. But there are specific businesses that will be impacted by this kind of tiered Internet usage structure. Online gaming is the first that comes to mind. This is now the primary business model for game manufacturers. Every gaming platform is connected to the Internet. The single player content is often secondary in importance to the users of the games. And every gaming device now can download new titles entirely from the Internet. This new business model for the gaming industry that drastically reduces overhead and cuts out the middle man would be jeopardized by requiring gamers to engage in a cost benefit analysis of whether the game would be worth the additional tiered charges.


I currently use Time Warner service to access the Internet. But that will change as soon as I can find an alternate service provider. The only thing a corporation can understand is their own greedy, short term, self interest. So the only way to communicate with them is with money. So I will be taking mine away from the finks at Time Warner for even thinking about using the byte as a metric for billing.