Frankston Tries Satire

In the tradition of Jonathan Swift's 1729 classic A Modest Proposal, Bob Frankston has turned the net neutrality debate on its head with a brilliant satire called Paying by the Stroll.

In this lovely little yarn, sidewalks are treated the way most want to treat bits. That is, when his character arrives at his new home he is urged to sign up with a "Transportation Service Provider" (TSP) and can only want what that TSP decides he can want.

Of course it's ludicrous. That's just the point. (So was the Irish eating their young. That was Swift's point.)

Bits, and the movement of bits, are now basic infrastructure, and the costs of that basic infrastructure are declining. Yet today's phone and cable giants insist that, in fact, infrastructure is expensive, that maintaining it is highly people-intensive, and that you should not only face rising prices for your bits, but they should control what you do with them.

By turning Moore's Law on its head, then standing underneath and shaking all the change that falls from the people, the Bells and CableCos hope to survive. But they can't.

In our world the need for bits is going up, and will continue to go up, even as the actual price of moving bits goes down. Today's 802.11n radios cost less than 802.11b did six years ago. The cost of optical multiplexing is falling, as the capacity of each fiber strand keeps rising.

Reality is even more bitter than Frankston's satire. The cost of putting in sidewalks is increasing, and in my part of east Atlanta crews are even now laying them down on streets that never had them until the houses along them came to cost $250,000 and more. It takes a crew of a dozen men a full week to grade and lay a block of sidewalk.

But you don't have to do that to lay down new fiber capacity, or new wireless capacity. You don't have to dig up the streets to get more bits. The only reason you're being charged as much as you are is because the phone giants are hoarding the bits, claiming in Congress the bits should become "services" like cable, and that other bits should be "services" like cellular.

The real question in all this is who will capture that value, and what will they do with it? The Bells want to hoard that value, dribble it out with an eye dropper, define it all as "services" and have you pay through the nose.

I think it's time we turned their world on its head, and faced it right-side up. That's my modest proposal -- the Bells must die.