Lay Techs: Tech for Laypeople

After nearly two decades since the Internet was introduced to the world, it's facing its greatest nemesis yet; capitalism. Not because the capitalist world has never seen the Internet as something worth capturing and milking, but because the capitalists at the time did not know what to make of this new technology and how it will change the consumption pattern of everyone worldwide. This ultimately paved way to a new age of capitalists born from the tech world, most of whom understood the Internet should be left a free and open highway for the greater good. That is, until recently.

During these two decades the traditional capitalists couldn't come to grips with the Internet wave as a new generation of entrepreneurs, more agile and keen-minded, leapt forward to snatch a huge chunk of the economic pie. These new generation of entrepreneurs were also more ethical in applying their business models because most believe money can be made by everyone for everyone regardless of family and influence, so long as their capabilities and attitude could show for it.

This generation, having control of most parts of everything that happened in the Internet, made sure Net Neutrality was maintained for the sake of making it the most affordable commodity in the history of mankind. And so it has because no other commodity was made so affordable to as many parts of the poorest nations in the world in such a short period of time.

What is Net Neutrality? In order to not bore the savvier folk, I urge the blur to refer to this article and this article for a proper introduction before moving forward.

There is an understanding by all technology giants that the Internet should always remain free, and by doing so they try to maintain balance of trade so nobody will have to pay nobody for the usage of each other's bandwidth. But although bandwidth itself is free, the fixed cost of building, maintaining and upgrading these infrastructure that provides the bandwidth is not. It's bloody expensive, in real money terms.

Comcast - The Neutral Net Disassembler

Comcast is the largest media and communications company in the world by revenue, with cable, and Internet and telephone services as main provisions. It is famous for various channels like E!, The Golf Channel, and Universal Pictures and Universal Parks & Resorts. Then it recently bought over Time Warner Cable, making it close to untouchable in these industries in the USA.

It is with this power it has been violating net neutrality practices without much repercussions, and is now advocating against net neutrality based on a few arguments. Firstly these is Netflix, currently the hottest video rental and streaming provider famous for revolutionizing content consumption in North America and possibly even the rest of the world.

Netflix's business model is to provide media, specifically movies and TV series, on-demand and by subscription. They have even recently started developing home-made original TV series, some of which were groundbreaking with multiple nominations in 2013 including the 71st Golden Globe. So naturally this phenomenon sparked a major flux of consumers into this new TV consumption concept, leaving industry leaders fearing another media revolution like what iTunes did with music.

And like how every capitalist giant in their respective industries deal with threats they do not understand or refuse to accept, they go all out to destroy at first sight. This is exactly what Comcast is doing not just with Netflix, but with every other net-reliant competitors about to emerge from here on. This could spell doom for Net Neutrality as we know it, giving way to multiple tiers of bandwidth and speed prices.

But before we blindly and fanatically take sides in this argument, let us analyse the points raised by both ends.

For Comcast

Although bandwidth transfer packets are essentially free across one medium to another, the media itself are made of physical towers and cables and servers and hubs. These physical infrastructures are expensive and have a very short lifespan thanks to the speed-of-light evolution of technology these days. And it is pretty evident that Netflix is consuming abnormal amounts of bandwidth compared to other net-intensive service providers in the USA.

In Comcast's defence, they are actually being fair to other companies not using that much bandwidth to pay relatively less for access. And although Netflix remains neutral in balance of trade, the fact that they are clogging up the 'highway' on both sides of the traffic doesn't justify them paying the same as everyone else sharing this highway.

The Internet being free and completely mobile was a policy understood and followed by everyone using it in order to have it adopted quickly across the world. But nobody ever said this policy is set in stone. After nearly two decades of massive worldwide adoption, some experts claim it to be high time the 'Cost of Internet' is revised. Comcast is now merely playing the devil by taking their first move to hedge against future any upcoming bandwidth-hungry companies like Netflix's so the cost of Internet infrastructure and transportation can be properly distributed evenly and fairly across usage volume. Soon the world will understand and agree with Comcast, and will find themselves silly for fighting something so inevitable.

For Net Neutrality

The reason companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Facebook were able to transform the way we communicate so dramatically in such a short time is mostly due to the Internet, the information highway, being free and open. This is leading to almost every household appliance being hooked into the Internet, Japan being able to receive disaster warning way before it hits, and Google be able to provide wireless Internet access to everyone in the world with the help of balloons. Slapping a price tag to everything that moves through this information highway is only going to hamper its advancement by that much.

Nobody would blame Comcast for being naive in business, but Comcast may think us consumers are by actively advocating these tiered charges to businesses. Businesses are here for profits, while at the same time giving us (hopefully) an equal value in return for taking our money. When ISPs charge businesses for bandwidth usage, all they are doing is only indirectly charge us consumers. At the end it consumers will pay for every cost that is incurred anywhere in the supply chain.

Don't tell me you guys can't see that Comcast is double dipping! They're charging consumers in multiple tiers for Internet access, then they also charge businesses multiple tiers for Internet access! So ultimately consumers are charged TWICE for using the Internet. This smells bad from all angles.

For the longest time ISPs and critics have been referring the Internet's transportation and trade like it's a physical product. Well it isn't, which means it does not come with marginal costs for transporting and storing them. They theoretically don't even have shelf lives. So why the hell are authorities letting something like this happen?!