Bloomberg has a story today about Comcast’s decision to delay their most active users’ broadband connections:
Comcast to Slow Some Web Traffic for Up to 20 Minutes
This is brilliant, simply brilliant. When a company’s roots are as a monopolist, they apparently need to be reminded about basic commercial principles. As the net grows in its usefulness and broadband applications like downloadable video reach mass adoption, consumers need more bandwidth. Instead of viewing this as a commercial opportunity, Comcast is trying to slow down their users from consuming more bandwidth. The customer wants more of the product, but Comcast doesn’t want to sell it to them. Why not introduce some concept of tiered pricing whereby customers consuming more bandwidth pay more? That’s how it works in corporate environments.
This reminds me of the early days of the net. Remember when we all connected to the net using modems over phone lines? The (monopolist) land line phone companies were complaining that customers were using up their copper line capacity. The nerve of those customers! Demonstrating demand for a product? Incredulous!
The biggest issue with Comcast’s decision, however much lack of business foresight it demonstrates, is that these actions will violate net neurtrality principles. It is no coincidence that Comcast will slow down your bandwidth-hogging activities like downloading movies, streaming video, and using skype to make free phone calls, while happily directing you to buy uninterrupted phone service and pay-per-view from them.