Mike,
I know it's Sunday, but I think it's time for me to sport my horns again.
In some ways I agree with you, but I'm looking at the situation from a slightly different perspective. Almost Machiavellian, like. No, make that Machiavellian, very like.
>The heard will demand "open access",and they will get it. Regulated internet telephony, won't be any fun either because the RBOCs will cry foul.<
Is there a point in time when ATHM's desire to exclude others from "their" medium (where they currently operate) can come back to bite it in the arse?
ATHM operates on several different strata. By nature, and as a consortium, ATHM has the privilege at this time of being the sole tenant on close to a couple dozen cable systems. In this sense, there is certainly the ISP faction within ATHM that would be competitive to all other interlopers, and the consortium factor works in its favor here.
But even ATHM must agree that they will not come to dominate all or even the majority of all eyeballs surfing and doing commerce on the 'net. Some have argued that they will not make their fortunes by subscriber fees alone, or if, in fact, those fees will even cover operating costs. Rather, their greatest fortunes are to be made through e-commerce and other collateral offerings and activities.
How will their exclusionary strategy affect the content and e-commerce side of ATHM, not having the ability to deliver its wares and novel forms of new-wave gimmickry to the majority of the net?
Sure, they can do this now, through gateways, as long as other ISPs allow them access to their servers and continue to peer with them. But the sword swings both ways.
Denial of access can just as easily be achieved at the server and NAP transfer points as it can at the coax level in the last mile. Actually, it's very simple for an AOL or a MSPG to exclude ATHM subscribers from their affiliated e-commerce partners, and the right set of incentives or disincentives just might allow that to occur.
Can someone point to a statute or legal precedent that would make this illegal, if a peer should decide not to renew a peering agreement? Remember, this is not regulated internety or telephony, yet. And from the looks of things, it wont be, for some appreciable time to come.
Like I stated in an upstream message, the Internet market place is still bound to the rules of free and open commerce. Its participants can do as they please.
Can ATHM survive as an isolated territory like an enclave, with its e-commerce strategy limited to directing it at its own, albeit sizable, audience? Will ATHM at some point find itself cut off at the knees (its nose) because it wanted to spite the remainder of the e-commerce world (its face)?
Think about it. Analogies can be drawn from other public access sectors, whether its the Interstate Highway System, or the switched public telephone network, or the greater Internet itself. Try to see this beyond the dimensions of the black cable.
While it is possible for ATHM to exclude other ISPs from using their last mile privileged medium at the physical layer, it's also possible for them to be penalized at the upper layers that make e-commerce work, by alliances of others as a form of retribution. Perhaps not through overt restraint of trade in the negative sense, but by virtue of a more affirmative avenue such as co-marketing agreements, in the positive sense. There are all kinds of ways to disguise a rose.
Of what value will it be to deliver high speed and super resolution, if you can only communicate such qualities within the sphere of a closed user group? Does anyone on this board know how to spell Compuserve? How about Wang?
Somewhere along the line, the relevance of these arguments and analogies will come into focus.
Having said all of the above, I still don't think there is enough room on today's HFC distribution nets to support the full bundle of current and future Internet delivery schemes that the ISPs have cooked up for us, going forward. It wasn't designed that way from the outset.
Instead, it was a backwardsly-engineered form of force-fit-make-it-work that is best suited for a single player at this time. And even at that, with some severe limitations, from a just-over-the-horizon perspective, I might add.
Indeed, when the HFC model was stabilized just less than a half decade ago, the folks over in CableLabs more or less knew then that there would be severe limitations. But like all diligent engineers and architects whose charge it is to make something out of nothing, preserving the embedded infrastructure to the greatest degree possible, they proceeded with its design and eventual buildout, anyway. This, at a time when debt was bleeding the MSOs, and there were no signs of a future T bailout anywhere on the radar screen.
Mitigating the situation somewhat was the fact that they still had in the backs of their minds the futuristic visions of TCI's Malone, BEL's Smith, and the usual assortment of Sunday C_SPAN discussion panel participants, the Interactive TV model, which was based on utilizing regular commercial TV program channels under the supervision of interactive set top boxes.
Which model (ITV) may still come to pass as a form of relief, but not anytime soon. The engineers simply had no way of knowing just four or five years ago what would materialize [indeed, what has already materialized] in that vision's stead.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
