Most people are consumers of content, not creators. However, as Web 2.0-style social networking, photo sharing and blogging interactivity increases, more people are and will be producers – and they will want to share their works over the Internet. But as an interesting AP story relates, there’s an imbalance in Internet uploading and downloading – but fortunately there’s no call for net neutrality legislation to address this (at least not yet).
From the article:
The system is a hangover of the old mass media days,” said Paul Saffo, a technology analyst in Palo Alto, Calif. “Some consumers are uploading a tremendous amount of information and that’s the thing the establishment just doesn’t get.”
Cable and phone providers insist they are keeping up with demand, in many cases increasing both upload and download speeds, but they say they haven’t had a huge clamoring for symmetry.
I agree with both of the above views, and I think that the market is responding pretty well to the majority of consumers. Like almost all journalists, Anick Jesdanun, the article’s author, tries to create some sort of conflict or lack of parity – hence the title “Imbalance in Net Speeds Impedes Sharing.” And regarding the state of the marketplace, the author states:
Broadband options are already better in many countries outside the United States, thanks to better government incentives and fewer rural regions that are difficult to reach. There, residents have access to a wider range of symmetric services.
I’m not sure how government incentives (ie. subsidies) and rural challenges (which in the U.S. is a large factor) affect the way ISPs decide to allocate bandwidth for up/downloading. They affect the total amount of broadband. And in the U.S., it has been regulatory disincentives that have affected broadband deployment – forced access, regulatory barriers for deploying video service, and a universal service program that props up rural providers and thereby makes it harder for new competitors to set up shop and compete.
And based on the following quote, the content companies (that increasingly rely on an interactive Internet) would only be hurting themselves by advocating for net neutrality regulation that would limit the way that infrastructure companies could price and partition their networks:
Gary Bachula, a vice president with the super-speedy, next-generation Internet2 network for government agencies and universities, said users in the United States might not even realize yet what they are missing. Service providers, he said, should be nudging customers toward data-intensive applications and realize they will pay more for value.
“Cable companies have been busy trying to offer telephone services, and telephone companies are trying to duplicate the cable TV model,” Bachula said. “They should stop focusing on 20th century services and realize it’s the 21st century. There are exciting new advanced services they could make money from.”
Perhaps it is government regulation – or the threat thereof – that, according to Bachula, keeps the cable and telecom companies from offering 21st century services?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Comments on this entry are closed.