Net Neutrality = Diet Soda, Part 4: the wrap-up

What the hell does this have to do with diet soda?

If you waded through all of that, you deserve an answer.

“Net Neutrality” sounds great. Democratic and fair. Who could be against it?

Full and final disclosure: I do not work for an ISP and will be quite happy to go to my grave never working for one again. You work like a dog, the compensation isn’t that great. The skill level required is very high (at least at the core; there are only a few hundred people in the US qualified to do it). Businesswise, your costs can change wildly, you’ve got a big bulls-eye on your back with dozens of people aiming at it:

• The family-values creeps who often are making money leasing you land, (especially in areas where churches have significant holdings). With a terabyte of netflow logs and the ability to correlate IP blocks to location, I could have written a PhD thesis on the level sexual deviance correlated with church membership, and a statistically-significant favoring of various sexual paraphilias as related to specific branches of various denominations.
• The mpaa/riaa/publishers who see ISP’s as basically a bunch of bored people who stand around passing out copies of Shrek IV: The Search For Happy Meal Tie-ins
• Municipalities, which might just decide that you only get that one extra foot of right-of-way for fiber if you’ll wire Mayor McFarkwad’s school with fiber. Not that he’s twisting your arm.
• Other regulatory costs. This cost has gone up since, oh, roughly October of 2001. It’s difficult to quantify these costs or recover them, and on a macro-economic level it seems overall like a piss-poor investment, but that’s just my opinion.
• Other ISP’s. Us techies might all like each other, but everybody wants job security. If I can figure a way to undercut another company, steal their customers, and have their car repo’ed at the same time…

Diet soda came on the market decades ago as consumers decided they liked soda, and wanted to drink more, but didn’t want to get fatter. The companies considered the possibility of saying “well gee, how about you just drink less?”, decided against it, and an entire industry was saved. The psychology of it is fascinating; how you can charge more per serving for a product with the same cost, by putting it in, say, an 8-pack instead of 12. there’s also significant evidence that the nature of the product itself leads to obesity. So while it sounds great and there’s a documented advantage to that one single can, overall it’s a pretty crappy deal for the buyer. (but don’t try telling ‘em that: they have a brand loyalty second only to cigarette smokers)

Network neutrality is the same crap. Even the most published study of it, ironically, pointed out that the carriers are, quite truly, content-agnostic. Far from being interested in censorship, or promoting a viewpoint, or silencing dissent, it’s just some basic traffic management.

• Bandwidth costs money.
• Customers don’t like tiered pricing. They like a fixed price, and they’ll happily give up features they don’t use.
• Customers want to be able to download something quickly.
• Some customers are a liability. A few customers are a major liability.
• If you can saddle your competitors with more liabilities than yourself, you win. (to the point that if I were in the business I’d personally pay for ads for my competitor on a few selected sites *chuckle*)

The irony of free-speech advocates demanding government monitoring of ISP traffic to ensure compliance with legislation is simply mind-blowing, face-palming, forehead-smacking stuff, proof that if you package it right, you truly can sell a refrigerator to an eskimo – with a service contract, no doubt.

Corporate customers won’t be affected. We’re used to paying a premium for higher uptime and guaranteed throughput. Residential users just want something cheap. First ISP to figure out (and successfully market) a “Casual Broadband” package is going to make some good money.

Screaming censorship every time someone asks you to be quiet in a movie tends to dilute the seriousness of the accusation. Let’s try and save it for the times – and they clearly exist – when it’s real.