The most ancient of readers will recall when “Ma Bell” tried to charge us for connecting a second rotary-dial phone to the same line, in the same home. So obviously full of #FAIL on a thousand metrics.
Grown ups in general will remember when incumbent DSL internet providers in the 1990′s tried to charge us for using a home hub or router to share our land line internet connection with more than one computer. Absurd, right?
When we access telecom services, we’re paying for a signal, a service, which has nothing to do with the devices connected to that service. Just like electricity or water. Today’s oligarchs want to charge us extra to use water from the tap when filling different shaped glasses, pitchers, carafes; or charge more if the water you get from the spigot is intended for cooking, drinking, or cleaning.
This oligarchic, bit-measured (they don’t even really exist, except as energy, humans!), device-centric contrivance is and always was nothing short of an abomination to common sense; the equivalent of having to pay extra for plugging in a toaster or blender to household electricity. Electricity has peak use and hence a kind of “congestion” too, yet nobody would ever dream of paying extra every time they plug in another desk lamp. Here’s the latest example from VerizonWireless, foisting precisely that model onto a captive, closed market:
“Data packages may not be used to tether your smartphone or basic phone to a computer or tablet, or as a Wi-Fi hotspot, unless you subscribe to Mobile Hotspot/Mobile Broadband Connect.”
Telecom oligarchs are the slum lords of bandwidth. They only build the bare minimum and then do everything they can to raise rents at the fastest possible pace while putting off improvements until someone takes them to court. The biggest #WIN for oligarchs, like slum lords, is that the vast majority of their tennants are in absolutely no position to be able to hold them accountable.
The answer to carrier complaints of “bandwidth hogs” (i.e., Smartest Innovators on The Network) is the same as it ever was: open networks, open markets up to more competition to keep building more capacity, faster, so that more innovation can continue to improve the entire interdependent system.
Cisco’s John Chambers answered “the congestion question” in the 1990′s and it’s still true today, there’s no scenario in which installing sufficient capacity doesn’t successfully and effectively kick the congestion can down the road. Unlike politics, in technology, kicking the can down the road isn’t a bad solution at all; in fact, it’s almost always been the way we grow into where we’re going, from where we are, with what we have on hand.
The answer for consumers is to Just Say No and/or practice Peaceful Conscientious Resistance through superior understanding and knowledge of their own, including opening more unlicensed spectrum and building our own nationwide mesh networks.
If we don’t realize that energy companies are watching carefully, and will try to pull the same stunt with ephemeral photon from the sun that oligarch telecoms are attempting — in pretending data packet of photons consist of mass and cost — then we have only ourselves to blame. Once the optical fibers and microwave towers are in place, the marginal costs of moving bits are as close to zero as one can get without literally vanishing into oblivion.
The bit-measured, device-centric telecom pricing phantasm is so ipso facto absurd that I can’t believe so many of us have spent 30 years explaining this in such excruciating detail, still to be met with a deer-in-the-headlights responses, more often than not. It’s just not that hard to grok; really it isn’t. I am definitely not that much smarter than the average bear; I know some really damned smart bears who remind me of this on a daily basis.
If supply and demand had anything to do with the way the world really works, then WATER should be priced like bandwidth and bandwidth like water. This is just one of the thousands of ways that we continue to see that the old capitalism has already passed, and the next capitalism, continues it’s evolutionary emergence. The olden ways were fine for the olden days and those days are long gone. It’s as fundamental as the Rights of Mankind to restate the aphormism that nobody can own the sun, the stars, the wind, or the sky. They are here for all, and apart from the initial cost of building the physical collectors and connectors, it’s all virtual FREE LUNCH. That’s what we mean by Apprehending Postscarcity. The world has changed.
To remix the late great Walt Kelly, “We have met the future, and it is us.”
