[ NNSquad ] Re: Metrics of Service

["James S. Huggins" <nnsquad@jsend.com>]

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So other factors are at work.  I assert that one of
    these is likely the understandable (from the ISP profit center
    standpoint) desire to promote ISP-generated content (e.g.
    U-verse video) over that of external Internet video services.
    But given the public lack of hard data about ISP deployments
    (which ISPs frequently tag as "proprietary") we're all really in
    the dark when it comes to the details.  And the big ISPs like it
    that way.

       -- Lauren Weinstein
          NNSquad Moderator ]
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For me personally, that is one of the huge problems. 

I had this personal position back when dinosaurs roamed. I didn't think that
the phone companies should be allowed to sell phones, much less prohibit
other people from doing so.

I can see an argument for "natural monopolies".  I can see an argument for
their investors to make a reasonable return and for their executives,
managers and employees to make reasonable salaries.

But that seems, to me, to be different to the situation that seems to be
evolving.

Lauren wrote about the "desire to promote ISP-generated content over that of
external Internet video services".

My question: should there even BE ISP-generated content? Or should content
creation and content delivery be separated?
     
James S. Huggins
        writing you from "Denver" on my vacation
        with Spot (my cat) on her acation in "Houston"
     

   [ Of course, cable companies were delivering video content before
     they got into the ISP business -- though the rise of
     cable-provided video-on-demand and the talk of Internet
     bandwidth caps seem to have followed parallel paths.  The firms
     involved may argue that their content delivery actually isn't
     part of their ISP services at all.  Cable will note that their
     own content offerings are "logically" separate (frequency-wise)
     on the physical cable -- though they make arbitrary decisions
     regarding how much bandwidth to allocate to Internet data vs.
     their own content's MPEG video data, so their argument is not
     convincing.  Services like AT&T U-verse are an even tougher
     sell in this respect, since they're really just a DSL line with
     an even less convincing "logical" separation.

     But either way, the public simply doesn't have enough
     information to draw firm conclusions as to whether or not the
     specific decisions being made by ISPs in these regards are
     reasonable, highly anti-competitive, or somewhere in-between.

     A skeptical point of view about such ISP activities seems
     completely appropriate at this stage.

       -- Lauren Weinstein
          NNSquad Moderator ]