p2pnet news | Freedom | P2P:- Does the name Denis McGrath seem familiar to you?

If it does, that’s probably because you’ve watched one of the many TV shows he’s written, such as The Border or Across the River to Motor City.

On his web page, Dead Things ON Sticks, he says: “This blog is entirely my opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the half-dozen companies that control just about everything else you read.”

Denis is Canadian and like a steadily moving number of other Canadians, he’s angry about the Net traffic throttling that’s going on here.

“While there’s a pause in the CRTC Hearing bafflegab, let’s kick for a moment toward something that’s NOT being talked about, but that has EVERYTHING to do with what’s going on in the ‘review‘ of the TV system currently going on in Gatineau,” he posts, continuing >>>

One look at the (mostly) aged white men asking the questions at the podium will tell you that this is not a particularly hip group. The challenges and implications of 21st century media is not likely to be something that motivates them. I would even go so far as to say, they probably don’t see the forest for the trees.

But the cable companies do. And so do the phone companies.

While they’re up there arguing for the entire system to be thrown open to deregulated, unrestricted American signals, there’s another battle quietly going on. If you’re a customer of Rogers or Bell, you’ve already seen the first stirrings of it: you may buy a nice high speed connection, but you’re not getting it. See, thanks to something called “traffic shaping,” or “throttling,” these companies are already trying to dip their toes into a much larger pool. Traffic shaping means that they throttle, or restrict, some types of media files going across the network. Like video. So video comes to you at a much lower bit rate than, say, email or text.

The telcoms and cablecos are testing and gauging the public’s taste for this right now because they have a much bigger target in mind: net neutrality. You might have heard that phrase, or maybe you haven’t, but this is a video that explains what’s going on and what’s at stake [See video at the end of this post].

That’s a US example, of course. But don’t for a moment think that Shaw and Rogers and Cogeco and Bell and Telus aren’t all over this as well.

Their plans for the future include controlling the pipe you can use to access the internet, and also being able to endrun Canadian channels to drive more American content to you — all while maintaining their historic protections through government regulation, without giving anything back, either to the system, or consumers.

As you watch the big corporations battle, remember this is lurking in the background.

They’re playing a much bigger game than you are.

“In Canada, we have a more heavily regulated broadcasting system than in the USA,” he told p2pnet, going on >>>

That’s a function of the fact that we’re 1/10th the size and could be easily overwhelmed by broadcast signals from the USA. Kind of like, how does the one BoSox fan express himself in a sea of 10 or 12 Yankee fans?

Anyway, the point I was trying to make with my post is that the same cable co’s who are pushing for complete degregulation in old media are also pushing for advantage in the new. And they’re doing it in the way that a lot of things get done in Canada — trying to shove it through before anybody notices or understands the implication.

I’m old enough that I was actually working for a show called “media television” the first time I ever saw a text-based web page drawn over a 14.4 modem.

We knew it was different. We knew email was something new. But now there’s a generation who have always grown up with email. And for them, email is old. Twitter and IM is much more immediate. The problem is that the regulatory people — the people making the decisions, are two or three generations removed from me watching agape at that first web page, and the kids for whom IM’ing is second nature. It’s the latter who have the most to lose. It’s their world. I don’t think they’re going to accept being dicated to, even as much as I did, or my parents, or the Senators and Congressmen do.

There was a time when the automobile was invented when good adults insisted that Henry Ford was wrong - that not everyone was going to want a car because most people didn’t need one. That came from a generation where living and dying in the same 20 mile strip of land was the norm. They couldn’t conceive that others after them would want a new reality.

I think net neutrality has to succeed, or ultimately, the generation coming will dismantle the strructures which tried to dismantle their understanding of the world.

You can take that as a threat, or as a premonition. But I don’t think it’s hopeless, and I do think that a lot of these CEO’s simply have no fucking idea who their future customers are.

IBM was once the most powerful company in the world.

As was the Dutch East India Company.

Times change.

They do.

Stay tuned.

(Thanks, Denis)

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 7:49 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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