So Netflix is at it again, asking the FCC to make it less expensive for its
subscribers to use their service. As we have been looking at the data cap issue
here over the past few days, this is very timely.
What may be even more significant is that this may be the issue the FCC is
looking for to justify rate regulation of broadband.
Sunday was the anniversary of 911. No I did not switch subjects.
Only a few weeks before 911, I attended a conference about the application of
interactive technology in the television industry. At that time the World Wide
Web was just taking form as we "struggled" to communicate with those slow
modems in our desktop and laptop computers. The conference was held at the
Marriott hotel next to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Getting on
and off the hotel elevators you could look directly into one of the towers. I
was taken back a bit by an unexpected reality. Rather than offices filled with
people, floor after floor of that tower was filled with servers - the
infrastructure that powered the financial district in lower Manhattan.
Needless to say, the loss of those floors full of servers had a huge impact on
our evolving digital economy.
Yesterday Bert and I mixed it up about the cost of overage charges for
broadband services with data caps. He was incensed by the fact that a Comcast
customer ran up a bill of $1,500. I pointed out that we would not expect to
drive around for free, or to receive a large discount if we consumed an
equivalent amount of gasoline...
The cost to operate the Internet, and the devices that connect to it is
massive. The following paragraph comes from a Time magazine article I just
posted separately:
Which uses more electricity: the iPhone in your pocket, or the refrigerator
humming in your kitchen? Hard as it might be to believe, the answer is
probably the iPhone. As you can read in a post on a new report by Mark Mills
— the CEO of the Digital Power Group, a tech- and investment-advisory firm —
a medium-size refrigerator that qualifies for the Environmental Protection
Agency’s Energy Star rating will use about 322 kW-h a year. The average
iPhone, according to Mills’ calculations, uses about 361 kW-h a year once the
wireless connections, data usage and battery charging are tallied up. And the
iPhone — even the latest iteration — doesn’t even keep your beer cold. (Hat
tip to the Breakthrough Institute for noting the report first.)
Netflix has asked the US Federal Communications Commission to declare that
home Internet data caps are unreasonable and that they limit customers’
ability to watch online video...
Data cap discrimination
Netflix went on to criticize ISPs for imposing data caps in a discriminatory
manner. ISPs can make some video services more expensive than others by
counting them against data caps while exempting favored services from the
customers' monthly limits, Netflix said.
"Because of a low data cap, an online service may need to pay an ISP to
zero-rate its traffic to enable that ISP's customers to access the online
service," Netflix wrote. "Such arrangements create an incentive for ISPs to
maintain artificially low caps. The Commission should clarify that
discriminatory application of data caps skew consumer choices and work
against consumer-driven incentives to deploy advanced telecommunications
capability."
