The author is a business owner in an extremely competitive, very "human resources" intense industry.
He has a gift for explaining things in a way that makes sense to me. For example, he explained the recent Government foray into "regulating" the internet in this way:
There is a battle that goes on in the marketplace in virtually every communication medium between content creators and content deliverers....In fact, this fight for rents across a vertical supply chain exists in virtually every industry. Consumers will pay so much for a finished product. Any vertical supply chain is constantly battling over how much each step in the chain gets of the final consumer price.
What "net neutrality" actually means is that certain people, including apparently the President, want to tip the balance in this negotiation towards the content creators...
Two companies (Netflix and Google) use half the total downstream US bandwidth. They use orders and orders of magnitude more bandwidth than any other content creators, but don't want to pay for it.
Why should you care? Well, the tilting of this balance has real implications for innovation. It creates incentives for content creators to devise new bandwidth-heavy services...it pretty much wipes out any incentive for ISP's (cable companies, phone companies, etc) to invest in bandwidth infrastructure.
There are folks out there who always feel better as a consumer if their services are heavily regulated by the Government. Well, the Internet is currently largely unregulated, but the cable TV industry is heavily regulated. Which one are you more satisfied with?
That is some darned good writing and I am proud to put him on my blog roll.
(Note: This essay was excerpted and any errors were made by me, ERJ.)
And at this rate there IS going to be a tiered system with those that spend the $$ getting access and MB speeds...
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