Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Thu Dec 16 09:47:32 UTC 2010

  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