[ NNSquad ] Re: NYT: Differing views on Time Warner's Bandwidth Cap Experiment

[Peter Eckersley <pde@eff.org>]

It isn't clear that surcharges after a quota are "better" than
throttling after a quota or vice versa.  In a healthy, competitive
market, consumers would have a choice between ISPs offering both of
these options, as well as not-specifically-limited and truly unlimited
plans.

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 09:33 -0800, Barry Gold wrote:
> Lauren Weinstein wrote:
> > http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/time-warner-download-too-much-and-you-might-pay-30-a-movie/?ref=technology
> 
> This is beyond stupid, and I hope TW gets smacked down by its customers 
> if and when they try this.  See my earlier post on what customers want.
> 
> Item 1: No surprises.  A $30 surcharge on their bill is going to result 
> in a very unhappy user.  I know what Time Warner is thinking: when the 
> user sees a $30 surcharge on his cable bill, he'll buy a higher service 
> tier and we make more money.  Well, it's a lot more likely that the user 
> will
>    a) Switch to satellite, DSL, or any other competitor he can find,
>    b) Write his city councilman about turning the city into a hotspot 
> (some small cities already are)
>    c) write his congressman about regulating cable prices.
> 
> So the *best* likely scenario is that TW loses a customer.  Other 
> possibilities include losing a whole city of customers, or being turned 
> into a regulated utility like phone and electric service used to be (and 
> natural gas still is).  That's a nice niche, you always make a 
> guaranteed profit -- but your profits are pretty strictly limited.
> 
> I hope TW and Comcast wise up, because frankly I *like* the current 
> (nearly) unregulated market.  But if they keep trying stunts like this, 
> they will feel like Wile E. Coyote when the anvil falls on him.
> 
> I can hear Brett and others asking, so what _should_ we do when we have 
> one customer who uses 100 times as much as our average.  Answer: 
> graceful degradation.  Slow him down.  This can be done manually -- you 
> notice that user X is using more than most, so you re-program his cable 
> modem to a lower bit rate, and/or drop some of the packets destined for 
> him.  Or you can just make it automatic - the system notices when a 
> customer is using a large amount of bandwidth over a period of time, and 
> takes steps.
> 
> And as I said elsewhere, I would favor allowing ISPs to modify the TCP 
> headers to reduce the window, even though strictly speaking it's a 
> violation of the protocol -- that header is supposed to be for 
> communication between the end-points.  But until we get protocol stacks 
> that actually _pay attention_ to Source Quench, I think this would be a 
> good way to limit bandwidth consumption.
-- 
Peter Eckersley                            pde@eff.org
Staff Technologist                Tel  +1 415 436 9333 x131
Electronic Frontier Foundation    Fax  +1 415 436 9993