ISPs and Tunnel Vision (2019)

Once upon a time, we had a functioning FCC that was contemplating the difference between content and infrastructure. The goal of an infrastructure business is to provide the best service to end-users. The goal of a content business is to get end-users to look at their stuff.

When you combine the two into one business, that business inevitably increases profits by reducing the quality of all services that do not lead directly to their own content.

Make it illegal for content businesses to own infrastructure businesses (and vice versa) and the need for other market regulations drastically decrease.

Counterpoints:

- Before the Internet was handed to the masses in the mid 90's, there was still a lot of creativity. In the past 50 years we have numerous new styles/genres of music, art, movies and other types of entertainment.

- Technically oriented, educated people that tend to be outside of popular social spheres were the ones that tended to understand the Internet the best, use it, communicate with others of a like mind, and were there in the initial rush in the 90's. I'll call these "Internet people". This is not most people. The same people that can't tell the difference between Facebook and the Internet still won't without zero ratings.

- Small websites were always hard to discover unless they happened to be in the right place at the right time or you were an Internet person and spent a lot of time exploring and looking. Google helped small websites for a while, but is now tuned to the normal user, not Internet people.

- Mass manipulation of society through Internet services doesn't need zero rating, it needs a self-feeding network effect and a site accessible enough to non-Internet people. Facebook has achieved this and didn't need zero rating to do it.

- Non-Internet people with their inability to see the Internet as anything other than television 2.0 + Facebook is causing ISPs to consider zero rating as something to capture customers with. Remember when various groups in the 50's and 60's said TV was evil? They were right.

I'm not quite sure if this needs a [2019] in the title, but it's from November of last year. I don't know where the cut off is for posts needing a [YEAR] tag added, 5 months ago might not be long enough?

This has been going on in earnest for almost ten years now (I configured zero rating for several services as far back as 2008, back when WAP was still a thing).

In Europe it’s a staple of many prepaid mobile data plans. The big difference now is that (some) telcos are actively doing it for OTT services (like streaming).

Merely tangential, but I’d missed or forgotten that you can use Keybase as a static hosting platform! Very cool.