Web superhighway likely to be toll road

So there seems to be a big broo-hah on the horizon about how ISPs will continue to provide to us all the of the great high-speed access to video, music, games and anything else that we can think of (legal or illegal) to use an internet connection for. What startles me though is the thought of ISPs forcing users to pay extra to have access to these features and an paid "extra". Worse yet is that they are saying that without this "innovation will be stifled".

Now I can understand that laying fibre costs money (even though we have more friggin unlit fibre in the ground than we need) and that these companies need to pay for bandwidth but give me a break. Charging me extra to have the avialability to download video or music that I already own the rights to is bullshit. Charging me extra to play games online is lame (see below for more comments on speed burst games). Essentially destroying digital distribution of legal downloads is bullshit, its the future and "innovation" for this market and something that a lot of people are relying on to stay competitive.

Honestly if ISPs want to curb the problem they need to implement and enforce a "your X dollars gets you Y bandwidth for this month" policies and then let their users do whatever the hell they want.

Note: This is much how my first cable ISP was. The company that provided this, Videotron, gave you 10GB of bandwidth for the month for $40 (CDN) from there they didn't care what you did. Why? Well it was simple, 10GB was more than enough for most users and those that went over it (for legal or illegal reasons) were billed accordingly. This in turn allowed Videotron to build onto and grow their network so that it remained flawless and incredibly fast. Sadly Videotron was bought out by Shaw Cable System who in turn terfed this agreement and have implemented their own very poor policies that IMHO have not allowed the system to grow as it needed.

As such, if they want to surf the web and be good (and legal) users that use iTune, buy software online, view trailers and play games they can and will without worries. If you get the "power users" who want to pirate everything under the sun from p2p and bittorrent, well they are billed for their over use of the system and either learn from their mistake not to do it again, or just pony up the cash and keep at it. It is honestly a remarkibly simple system that works perfectly fine, but I guess if the ISPs want to be greedy crack monkies who try to up-sell people on "addon" that is their perogitive to do so, I just hope that they don't expect people to take this laying down.

Interesting Thought

One thing that I find interesting is that in the big hype of the evil P2P days of Napster there was an informal poll done whether people thought that it was illegal for them to download music or not. The majority of the people polled felt that it was legal because they paid their ISP for the connection and they thought/felt that the ISP paid a kickback to these IP holders in return. So my thought is this... if the ISPs offer these "addons" to allow me to download say music, won't they effectively be running themselves into trouble because in the mind of the user legitamizing illegal downloads of songs because they paid for this service?

A quick aside on the idea of offering speed-burst games (aside from the fact that its incredibly stupid)...

- Who decides what games are choosen? As a smaller indie developer this troubles me because I make great games too that might not be mainstream but are still popular and played daily. So if an ISP chooses to speed burst only the most popular games and in effect caps mine, this gives an unfair advantage to those games and will cost me sales because a user will have a less than stellar play experiance than in comparison to the main stream game. For me and many of my peers every dollar of every sale counts and we can ill afford to lose sales because of a feature like this giving an unfair competetive advantage.

- How do you keep Payolla scams from happening? For those of you who are unaware, Payolla was (and still is) a scam where record industry guys give money (and in today's market special prizes) to station managers for playing certain songs to make them seem more popular. Now translate this into games where say a big EA of the world can go to the ISPs, give them money to ensure their games are supported with speed-bursting... now you have an unfair competetive advantage where the big players in this market can throw their money around to maintain dominence.

- As a developer I can see a loss of sales or worse yet increased tech support required. Why? Well its simple, the end user does not blame the ISP for issues with an application or game, they blame the developer first. So when they go play their favorite game and the net play lags, they fire off a nasty email to the developers. Now the developer needs to find out whats wrong and respond. Now I doubt any of you have done game's tech support but lets just say that as a whole users rarely respond nicely to you saying "sorry but the problem is with your ISP and X feature that they have implemented, we cannot help you with this issue, contact your ISP".

- ISP tech support is at best mickey mouse crap. Its designed to get you through as fast as possible and point the blame somewhere (rarely at itself) so that it can handle the call volume that is required by its regulation body.