Welcome to the flip side of Moore’s Law, the problem of abundance.
The problem of abundance hit the PC industry starting in the late 1990s. Too many Hertz, too much storage, what can we do with it all? For many years Microsoft seemed to have answers (bloatware! multimedia! movies!) but in this decade even Microsoft has been unable to keep PC prices high, to make the latest-and-greatest a must-have. So PC prices have fallen, at retail, dramatically. What was a $2,000 PC 10 years ago is now at $400 PC. What was a $3,000 laptop can now be had for $700.
The problem is even more dramatic in telecomm. It killed Enron, as I noted in my book The Blankenhorn Effect. But the Bells saw this coming, and killed the CLECs, their bit re-sale channel. They created a monopoly in many areas, a duopoly (with cable) in others, and moved toward service-oriented architecture.
The idea of a service-oriented architecture is you don’t sell bits, you sell services. A phone call is a service. A TV channel is a service. And you hoard general-purpose bits. You don’t open up a full phone line for DSL, you give cable Internet service the equivalent of just one TV channel. By creating this bottleneck, you keep prices high. Why should you pay $50/month for 1.5 Mbps downloads (and only 384K up)? Why should cable modem service cost $40/month when HBO costs $8?
In this environment of artificial, forced scarcity, the biggest danger
is competition. So the phone companies are trying to kill municipal
broadband at the state level, and kill open spectrum at the federal
level.
Killing network neutrality is just icing on the cake. It enables them to get full use of the Cisco boxes they’ve been buying for the center of their networks.
Cisco Service Control lets you define what each bit wants to do so you can slow it down, stop it, or hold it for ransom. Governments like this because it lets them control what everyone does with the Internet. Want to ban pornography? VOIP? Criticism of Dear Leader? You can do it with this box.
Thus, by manipulating abundance to kill competition and government to enforce an artificial scarcity, the marriage between business monopolies and absolutist government is consummated. The Internet, the greatest force for liberation in the history of the world, is instantly tamed, and turned into an instrument of oppression instead.
Of course, the economy goes to hell in a handbasket, and eventually you’re fighting a quiet (and increasingly noisy) civil war, but that’s a small price to pay for law and order.
