Your're all wrong. A per-minute charge is exactly what the internet needs right now.
Granted, .10 is probably extreme, and I would argue for a two-tier rate structure so that businesses would subsidize private individuals, similar to the current phone rate structure. But remember, costs are decreasing extremely rapidly, so .10 would not be with us for long. The ramp down would ultimately become as fast as PC price.
Right now, the average tax-payer and average phone-user is subsidizing the long-hours net surfer. Long-hours net surfing is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but understand that currently 50% of the bandwidth of the internet is taken up by the transmission of pornographic materials. All of these porno freaks are on the net so much precisely because it is free and convenient to access.
Pornography, despite what some might think, has been the initial driving force for a
number of new technologies throughout America's past. From print to photography to
color photography to home-movies to theatre movies to VCR and now the Internet,
porno has been a prime driver in that it has served as a source of income to fund the
cutting edge innovation in application of these technologies.
It is well known amongst those who study these things, that VCR might never have
gotten off the ground were it not for the initial profits to the electronics companies
provided by royalties and equipment from the original wave of VCR users: porno
fiends.
Similary, as was pointed out at WebMarketWest last year with striking delivery by a
well-known entrepreneurer: with VERY few exceptions, the only profits being made
on the Web currently are by the purveyors of porno. And they by and large have the
most cutting edge web sites as well.
The RBOCs are in a very difficult situation. To enable the technological envelope to
push forward at its "naturally driven rate" - in other words to continue to enable
technology and those who create it and pursue it - they must add massive capacity.
They are not compensated by the ISPs. They provide the ISPs their pipes into the local bandwidth for free. Indirectly, they make money from installation
of 2nd lines and installation of advanced speeds (ISDN, xDSL) - but these come with
costs. For the most part, they are rapidly losing profit margins thanks to the
internet. $19.95 unlimited access exists ONLY because of government subsidies to the
RBOCs.
The old rate regulation which saved the RBOC bacon is crumbling : MCI and others are moving into the local loop and killing the RBOCs on price. RBOCs are unable and unwilling to add the massive new infrastructure the internet is demanding unless it can be shown to be a money-making, not money-losing business. Already, savvy high-priced business-only ISPs are totally bypassing the local loop - they realize that very soon standard ISP net services will be so slow and unreliable so as to be totally useless. Something has to crack or the future of the whole internet is endangered.
While you can babble about free speech all you want, the facts of the matter are that
right now the average taxpayer is subsidizing the long-hours web surfer. A great many
of the long-hours web-surfers are using the web for nothing but porno. And the total
bandwidth cost is over half what is available. So, the average taxpayer (probably not a
porno fiend) is subsidizing the porno fiends with his hard-earned tax-dollars.
Hambrecht & Quist the highly respected technology investment bank has recently put
out a report which clearly shows that flat-rate ISP and the defacto government
subsidization which allows it will not exist very much longer. Why? Because it will be
legislated away as being unfair. Here is the link:
techweb.com
Once the cost of internet long-hours surfing goes up, you can bet you last dollar that
the relative amount of porno-fiend long-hour surfing will go down drastically. Why?
Because porno-surfing is not a revenue producing activity.
The issues have nothing to do with free speech. The issues have to do with who is
paying for what, do they want to be paying for that, and how do we remedy the unfair
situation. |
