ISPs

New broadband stimulus proposal emerges from FCC inquiry

A proposal to pay ISPs to connect broadband customers is one of those that’s emerging out of the FCC broadband policy debate, and the concept has some merit. A direct payment for a connected subscriber might address the fact that there is a very large base of consumers who can get broadband but don’t, and not being willing/able to pay for it appears to be the largest reason.

A subsidy would be a strong incentive to boost broadband usage, but there are major risks. The incentive might spawn another overlay CLEC model that doesn’t really address cost management and thus doesn’t create a viable market. Users might be pirated to gain their subsidies and given substandard services. Some significant tuning on the idea is essential if it’s to form an element of a future broadband policy. We think, for example, that the funds should go only to ISPs who provide facility-based services.

Comcast appeals FCC traffic management order

Comcast has decided to appeal the FCC’s order for the cable giant to stop metering P2P traffic, even though Comcast ceased that practice even before the FCC order was issued. The goal of the company is to test the FCC’s net neutrality principles, which since they were not contained in an FCC rulemaking/order, are likely not to have force of law.

The move, which is supported by some other ISPs, may well backfire on the industry because an FCC decision that did not, in fact, have enforceable net neutrality principles (which the agency has long said it did) would certainly result in the introduction of legislation. That might be far more restricting, and it might open other issues as well.

We said when this order was issued that Comcast would be foolish to appeal it, and Comcast appears to have been just that.

Online viewing: New study points to the issues

A new piece of university research shows that TV still has the largest eyeball share by far, and in every demographic group. Online video accounts for only a half-percent of viewing time overall, in fact. Computer video commands less than half the time that console gaming does.

All of this proves that the impact of online video on advertising and TV is indirect and not a matter of stealing eyeballs, as some suggest. We believe that the study validates other material we’ve cited here in the past and shows that the notion that online video advertising is the future of online revenue is, at the very least, far from fulfillment.

This is significant first because it means a lot of startups are probably doomed and YouTube will probably not monetize effectively. More significantly, it means that ad revenue can’t be expected to bolster Internet bandwidth growth, even if we figured out how to flow some of it to the ISPs. Ad revenue loss, partly to online, is indeed a problem for TV, but grabbing online video ads won’t be anyone’s solution.

Internet security: No easy fix

The issue of Internet security, and in fact of computer security overall, has become more difficult through the years, enough to prompt some to ask whether we need a “new Internet” that is less vulnerable.

Stanford’s Clean Slate approach and other academic programs are hoping to answer the question, but the problem is that these approaches are academic; the Internet is here to stay in substantially its current form because it would be too costly to fix it.

That doesn’t mean that security issues can’t be fixed. The biggest problems come from the presumption of anonymity; addressing and identification data on the Internet isn’t authoritative, and so you can’t “trace the call” as reliably as with the PSTN. Much of that could be fixed by requiring ISPs to provide authentic addresses for all packets, but that movement hasn’t made headway in the Internet world.

Thus, we believe this is (unfortunately) much ado about nothing, though there may be some incremental steps suggested by the work.