[1st-mile-nm] Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly, and Unfair on Vimeo

[Steve Ross]

I'm a reluctant fan of Crawford and Moyers, but her book and this interview
miss the mark. There are major inaccuracies in the interview itself. For
instance, Crawford says Manhattan suffers from a Time Warner Cable
monopoly, although Verizon is bringing FiOS to every household in NYC. I
have a small apartment in Manhattan and I have a choice! So does Crawford,
I suspect.

But the biggest problem is with the content providers, not the broadband
providers. Thanks to predatory practices among the content providers there
is almost no profit in video -- but they have to provide it. SOMEONE has to
pay for building the network, and that someone is the consumer of pure
Internet broadband. The providers need to get $20-30 profit per month per
subscriber to pay for the network, and they only get $5-10 from video, zero
from voice.

BTW, data we're publishing this month shows that fiber customers pay the
highest monthly fee for pure broadband access but they pay the least per
Mbps.

My magazine (www.bbcmag.com) calls for anyone to be able to build networks
and we have editorialized for public broadband. But between higher content
costs and less population density, and  oddities in pricing  (Europeans pay
low phone bills but pay $500+ for the phone!) most of what Crawford is
complaining about is not caused by the companies she faults. In this
interview, she comes across as either an idiot or a liar. She's better than
that.


On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 10:39 PM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com> wrote:

> http://vimeo.com/59236702
>
> Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly, and Unfair
>
> -tj
>
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> 1st-mile-nm mailing list
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>


-- 
Steve Ross
Corporate Editor, Broadband Communities Magazine (www.bbcmag.com)
201-456-5933 mobile, 781-284-8810 landline
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