Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Fri Dec 17 06:09:50 UTC 2010

----- Original Message -----
> From: "George Bonser" <gbonser at seven.com>

> Turn the question around. What would any provider think if a city said
> "sure, you can have access to our residents' eyeballs. It will cost
> you $5 per subscriber per month". Would Comcast or anyone go for that?
> That is a real question, by the way. For all I know some municipality
> might already do that. But say one with something between 100,000 and
> 1,000,000 potential subscribers did that. Would any of the providers
> think that is "fair"? Particularly *after* the provider is already
> providing services to those subscribers and then has the rules changed
> on them after they already have contracts in place with the
> subscribers?

I believe you're looking for Rose.net/CNS in Thomasville GA:

http://www.cns-internet.com/aboutcns.shtml

Why not go *ask* competing providers what they think?

> It just seems to me to be an evil Pandora's box that once opened,
> there is no potential end to. What if several cities ganged up and
> together decided to charge a last mile provider access to eyeballs?

What about it?

> Better in my opinion to let the end user pay for what they use. It

That's orthogonal to who should be providing it, so the rest of your graf:

> doesn't have to be strictly metered per meg but can be put into tiers
> (as most providers already do anyway). Sort of like "smart meters"
> they are doing with electricity. People will modify their usage
> according to what they can afford. Pricing bandwidth according to
> basic principles of supply and demand would probably work better.
> Those that use more would pay more, those that use less would pay
> less.

is a strawman.

And note that I don't *care* whether commercial entities think a given
approach is "fair" or not: they sure don't care whether *we* think their
practices are "fair".

No one is entitled to continue to make a living in any particular way,
by law or any other facility.  I thought that was attributable to 
Judge Learned Hand, but as it turns out, I stole it from Robert Heinlein,
who used it in a speech from a judge in his very first published story,
Lifeline.

Perhaps Bill Patterson, his biographer, knows where he stole it from.

It's still an excellent thing to remember.

Lots of companies have sprung up to fulfill a niche -- full motion NTSC
video processing in PCs, frex -- and then had to find something else to
do when the pendulum swung from hardware back to software.

Cheers,
-- jra