Tiered Internet Service
James Suroweicki (Financial Page writer for the New Yorker) wrote a great piece on the dangers of tiered internet service a couple weeks ago. He’s right on (as always). Tiered internet service is a lousy idea that only benefits the big telecoms (and probably only benefits them in the short run). His piece is worth reading – and is still on-line. Here’s my data-viz-programmer-centric take…
What is tiered internet service? The big telecoms (AT&T, etc.) are lobbying Congress to allow them to sell the equivalent of internet express lanes to certain sites. Right now, internet access to findr is just as fast as access to flickr (and political blog access is equal to Fox News). (This is different from hosting – think pipes not servers – like having two connections: high-speed for some sites, dial-up for others.) If the equal access changes, two trends driving Web 2.0 innovation - individuals being able to compete with bigger companies, and small start-up costs - will be affected.
Equal access to broadband matters because the browser is becoming the new desktop (see writely, etc). And it’s that change that is driving innovation. I can’t get people to download and install a program I write - let alone get them to download my constant updates. That’s what Microsoft can do. But, because people have high-speed access and are getting used to web sites that are more application than information, findr gets used all the time. But, if findr, montager, or retrievr, run significantly slower than flickr, a lot less people will use them. And if less people use these experiments, a couple things happen 1. Less innovation: less time will be spent improving these apps/experiments and developing new ones. 2. Less inspiration: fewer people viewing means fewer people thinking “I can do better.†Now, I would still build experiments if less people used findr. But, there’s nothing like a bunch of people using your app to get you to fix a bug – or to make that UI improvement you keep putting off.
The telcoms are just being shortsighted anyway. Sure, no one is signing up for high speed because they want to use findr (my Mom won’t even do that). But… 1. A lot of the big internet success stories today are started by one or two people (e.g., flickr). (For every gmail, there is a digg.) Keeping equal access encourages people to try new things. And the more good things there are on-line, the more people will want high-speed 2. For many, finding new stuff is why you have high-speed. Viewing Related Tag Browser for the first time was inspiring for me. If I’m paying $/month, I want Related Tag Browser (and the next Related Tag Browser) to come into my house just as fast as Fox News.
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