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AT&T's Net Neutrality Doublethink
GMGruman writes "George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog post, for its new ads saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the under-served areas of the US. If it and its carrier partners win, 'Internet freedom' will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons."
. . . water and electricity are not finite.
[citation needed]
"Hydroelectricity is a low-cost, non-polluting, renewable energy source. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water
Alright, so here are a couple of facts.
1) Data is an infinite resource.
2) Transmission capacity is a finite resource.
You are not paying your ISP for the data you receive. The data is not owned by your ISP, it's owned by, for instance, Google. What you are paying for, is the transmission of said data from Google to you. As you can see above, transmission capacity is not infinite. How do we measure this capacity? In bytes per second. So, basically, you can charge by Bytes, you can charge by Seconds, and you can charge by Bytes/Second.
Back in the day, you connected to the internet and you were charged by how long you were connected (back in the dial-up days, before unlimited). That model doesn't work any more. Now you are connected to your computer all day, and you computer communicates with servers in the background, even when you are not on.
Right now, ISPs are charging by Bytes/Second. The problem with this model is that ISPs give 5000 people a 10Mb throttle on a 1Gb pipe (i have no idea of the actual numbers, i'm just saying that they oversell), since they know that each of those people won't be on the internet all day long. So when 1000 of those people are all online at the same time, you get much less than the 10Mb they promised you.
The model I am in favor of is charging by Bytes, and just let the data flow as fast as it can at any given time. You can use as much bandwidth as you can get your hands on, but you will pay for it. ISP will have incentive to upgrade their pipes, because the bigger the pipe, the more data can flow through it and the more money they make. Bandwidth hogs will pay their fair share.