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Time Warner Wants More

I’ve been living happily without television for over 20 years.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy TV, it’s just that life is too short to spend it on the couch waiting for the trickle of information that comes out of that box. I much prefer to search for my info and entertainment on the web. And, in the last few years, that’s become a much richer environment with broadband internet and services like You-Tube, Last.fm and Hulu.

That happy infotopia could vanish if Time Warner’s latest plan goes into effect. Yesterday, Saul Hansell reported in The New York Times that Time Warner wants to charge $150 per month for unlimited internet service. Right now I pay $45 per month to Time Warner for unlimited internet service.

I’d gladly switch to another ISP, except in my part of Brooklyn, and in much of NYC, it’s Time Warner or dial-up. That’s not much of a choice.

In the pre-internet era, when municipalities granted cable companies exclusive rights to regions, they extracted concessions like public-access cable channels in return.

Now that cable companies are de-facto monopolies of internet service, cities and states should get something in return.

Comcast has met the challenge of increased net usage with a cap on bandwidth at 250 GB a month. This seems fair.

Maybe Congress could draft legislation that would enable the FCC to impose a standard bandwidth allowance of 250 gigabytes per user per month. Over that limit, the cable company could charge a fixed scale of fees for increased bandwidth.

This would be a great help to those of us who make our living online, or to those of us who would rather not be subject to the inanities of Fox News, A&E and CNN.

Freepress.net has been quick to set up a Congressional spammer to faclitate citizen feedback on Time Warner’s effort to charge more for less. Use this link to send a message to your representatives about Time Warner’s move to shut off the net. Or sit on the couch and do nothing. All you’ve got to lose is your self-respect — and $105 more per month.

Comcast’s Data Cap Solution

Back in October 2007 we relayed a story about cable giant Comcast selectively limiting some of the traffic over its wires ( see Comcast Throttles Uploads). This month Wired magazine has done a thorough follow-up on the story called The Dark Lord of Broadband Tries to Fix Comcast’s Image.

Since that story broke, Comcast has been vilified in the media and by the FCC. Apparently, cable companies are inured to a certain amount of complaining from irate TV fans, but were unprepared for the storm of protest unleashed by free-speech absolutists and net-neutrality mavens. However Comcast isn’t just providing an entertainment service. Now that so much business is transacted over the net, and the majority of Americans have always-on connections, Internet service is now seen as a utility, like electricity and water. And utilities — especially information utilities — are subject to a whole different level of scrutiny.

The good news is that Comcast has arrived at a fair solution that serves its customers and preserves the viability of its network. The cable company has imposed a cap on bandwidth at 250 GB a month. That’s enough to download over 100 standard-definition movies a month. More importantly, this solution is in line with the principles of common carriage. It can serve as a good model as the web matures.

Web 3.0 Etc.

Last December our favorite futurist, Kevin Kelly, delivered a talk at the EG Conference entitled “Predicting the Next 5000 Days of the Web”. In it he probes the dimensions of today’s web with its billions of transistors, linkages and massive stores of memory. Kelly posits a compelling vision of One Machine as a global repository of knowledge with all the screens in the world plugged into it. He also talks about how the web is restructuring from its present state of pages linking to pages to a web where data links to data, or ideas to ideas — the so-called Semantic Web, or Web 3.0.

And where’s it all going? According to Kelly, to an internet of things, where mobile devices share information with the network and knowing just requires participation. We hope that’s a good thing.

Year of the Bear

It’s been a frightening few weeks for people with some money in the market. Each new day brought precipitous sell-offs that erased thousands in putative value from 401k plans. Economists went from debating whether or not we were actually in a recession to guessing how long the panic might last.

Over the weekend, The New York Times’ interactive team provided some much-needed perspective with this concise infographic comparing the Panic of ‘08 to other downturns. This data-driven Flash chart shows percentage loss in value for the S&P 500 (adjusted for inflation) and duration of the bear markets over the last 80 years.

Investors can take some comfort in learning that this year’s market isn’t nearly as deep as the Crash of ‘29, which wiped out 80 percent of the market’s value, or as long at the bear market of 1937-42, which dragged on for 5 years.

Although, 9 of the 12 downturns charted lasted longer than the bear market of 2008 has so far.

Pre-emptive Recycling

A big part of information management is filtering out the crap you don’t need. This morning, NPR’s excellent Marketplace program mentioned an IM tool whose time has come: Catalog Choice.

Catalog Choice is a way to opt out of many of the catalogs that are crammed into your mailbox each day. Each year some 19 billion catalogs are mailed to Americans. And each year 18.9 billion of us chuck them straight into the recycling bin. That’s a lot of wasted paper, time and energy. Catalog Choice gives consumers the option to say “no thanks” in advance.

Unlike the National Do Not Call Registry, which is maintained by the FTC, Catalog Choice is a private non-profit venture. The project is funded by the Overbrook Foundation , the Merck Family Fund and the Kendeda Foundation. The well conceived and easy-to-use site design was done by Makalu Media.