Comcasticular Cancer

Comcast is chewing the cud and considering metering their broadband service. While this business model is very common around the world, they'll be one of the first major US providers if they go through with it as planned.

Some... *ahem* EFF... have suggested metering as a net neutrality compromise since it is a way for ISPs to raise profits, control Bit Torrent (P2P) usage, and keep the internet "neutral". But this is not really the case when you dive in to the specifics. The EFF, for all its good, I believe is wildly mistaken in discussing metering as a possible solution to Comcast's under-handed dealings.

So who loses under a metered system most of all? People in low socioeconomic areas, artists, entrepreneurs, video and audio streaming services, small businesses, and pretty much anyone who does anything of substance on the internet.

Com'on, let's dance...

(1) Where does metering end up? Comcast's 250GB test seems like a lot (and actually Comcast currently bans users at about 90GB) - and it is by today's standards. In a year or two with increasing storage and transfer rates, not so much. I'm guessing they are testing the waters of public opinion and eventually settle on a range similar limit to other per-byte ISPs (500mb-100GB). In most places, 5-20GB is considered "normal use" and that isn't very much playing room for your average web surfer these days. Even worse, $40 US gets you about 5-10GB per month in Australia. It could within reason (especially if you look around the world) reach the point where $40/mo buys the ability to only check your email and do basic web browsing (~5GB). At that cost, it's easy to imagine media such as music and video will once again be primarily obtained in physical form. Just like the internet never happened. Take that, Al Gore. Own stock in Borders Books? Maybe you should. It's cheap right now.

(2) Metering reduces ability to collaborate. If a user is working with a video crew in NY and I'm in LA, transferring video or music tracks or whatever back and forth would be extremely expensive. One 1 minute of 1080p HD video is about 8GB uncompressed. Using a standard consumer HD camcorder, a minute is about 4GB. It's cheaper to overnight hard drives around, but clearly prohibitively expensive for people trying to film an amateur video. Even a 3-minute music track in an audio program can easily be more than a few gigabytes in size.

(3) Metering reduces legal use of P2P services. Believe it or not, Bit Torrent is extremely important as a commercial tool for software deployment because it allows companies with little or no server infrastructures to propagate their software without paying the high server costs required. For an example on the art and entertainment side of things, Nine Inch Nails just released an album for free over Bit Torrent. There is an 80mb mp3 version, a 250mb CD-quality version, and a 1.2GB studio quality version (higher quality than CD). Only Richie Rich would want to seed (share) files if the meter is running, so the 1.2GB version would be next to impossible to release for free and musicians and enthusiasts would miss out on being able to remix and use neat stuff like 24/96 recordings. Same goes for movie releases by any amateur director or videographer.

(4) Metering reduces ability to share. How do you get your videos, audio, pictures, or any other data out there if every time you send it to someone it goes on the meter. Messaging or emailing someone a file is out of the question since you would need to transfer the file many times to get it to numerous people. You'll need storage online so you only have to upload it once - and that is a serious investment.

(5) The end of the beginning of the era video streaming and rentals. A video to YouTube is currently 250-300kps with talk of increasing size and quality in the foreseeable future. That's around a gigabyte per hour of YouTube. If you watch streaming much, you might want to go back to cable. And that's really low quality video even by internet streaming standards. Other video services, such as Hulu use much higher quality video. And AppleTVs and Xbox Video are even higher still - with an HD moves tanking in at as much as 7GB (btw, sent to you quickly via Bit Torrent technology - see #3). So you can see the dilemma. Own any Netflix stock?

(6) Disenfranchisement of various socioeconomic groups. I'm going to tread lightly here, but it's a subject close to Net Neutrality as well. So let's try a couple vague examples: let's say you are a bright kid who wants to start a web service out of your house - maybe sending singing video-grams. Nope. Can't. Not enough money for all that bandwidth. How about working on a new studio album for internet release. Sorry. Can't download those audio packs or virtual instruments or samples. And can't share your raw music with people because Bit Torrent is too expensive and MySpace has too many restrictions. Forget about doing anything on your own terms or at least without ads for dating services all over your content.

I'm not going to get into these, but here are additional items to think about:

• Gigabytes do not stay constant. Phones can get away with metered minutes, because a minute is a minute no matter what and just as useful for communication now as it was 500 years ago. However a gigabyte becomes less and less useful every day. The cost of a gigabyte of storage drops around 50-75% every year. And in general, 3.5" hard drives double in capacity about every 1-2 years in recent history. Will the cost of metered internet keep up with this? Maybe, but doesn't seem likely.

• RIAA, MIAA, and Comcast sandwich. Metering really, really serves the RIAA and MIAA since music and video sharing will be obliterated. But it also harms legal and hobby uses of multimedia.

• Future uses of the internet are unknown. What other high-bandwidth but awesome technologies will never be produced due to high consumer cost?

• How expensive is bandwidth at cost for Comcast? Rough estimates put it in the fraction of a penny per gigabyte. Clearly clever and funny advertising is major overhead, though.

• The final quagmire. Take a peek at Australia's meter internet implementation: http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/?action=search.