Re: [PLUG] Taking a Whack Against Comcast

[zuzu <sean.zuzu@gmail.com>]

On 10/28/07, Art Alexion <art.alexion@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> I once read on this list a note from a comcast customer who had their
> connection closed for a couple of days by comcast for using too much
> bandwidth.  Comcast refused to define what was "too much".
>
> I never read the comcast TOS, but I pointed out that if the "agreement" (only
> a federal judge, late of a large law firm with mostly corporate clients could
> call it an "agreement" with a straight face) doesn't provide defined limits,
> then there are no limits, and he should complain.
>

this was a saga on BoingBoing (and also Slashdot), some of which I've
already posted.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/22/comcast-also-screwin.html
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/23/1314222

Comcast seems to want their cake and eat it too.  they don't want the
negative market effects/feedback by customers of metered transfer, but
they don't want to have to fulfill an obligation of genuinely
unlimited *transfer* for a given bandwidth either.  this leads to alot
of marketing and legal mumbo-jumbo in their contracts vis-a-vis
"guaranteed bandwidth" etc.  at the same time Comcast fears complete
commoditization of their business (simply the most bits-per-second at
the cheapest rate).



Cory makes a good point (also said by Chris Andersson in 'The Long
Tail') about the cognitive frictions of calculating opportunity costs
with metered versus unmetered transfer:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/23/verizon-forced-to-st.html

#2 posted by Cory Doctorow , October 24, 2007 2:12 AM:

The problem with per-bit pricing is that -- unlike per-minute pricing
-- there is no natural human faculty for determining your bit-use.
Quick: how many bits did you download when you loaded this page?

It's also not auditable -- there's no way for you to know how many
bits you're drawing without relying on your telco's total. Since
telcos have a long history of bad billing practices, this is an
attractive nuisance at best, an invitation to fraud at worst.

At the end of the day, "bits transferred" is a crummy way to sell
Internet service to individuals. We generally have little control over
how many bits we download (the 12k html file you download might have
250 400kb images on it) and even less sense of how much we download.
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