Turtles all the way down

Mark Cuban, who usually has reasonable, well thought out points behind his arguments, has been missing the point lately in his bashing of peer to peer traffic. His latest missive states:

So I’ve come up with a better way to get rid of P2P without calling for an outright disabling of the protocol. Maybe ISPs should just treat upstream bandwidth the way cellphone companies treat minutes. Give users an option on how many upstream bits they want to be able to use and during what times of day.

Charge more during prime usage times, less during off hours. For most internet users, like probably 99pct of us, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in our bills or consumption. In fact, many of us could opt for cheaper plans because beyond the family photos or videos we may upload every now and then, or the rare backup of our hard drives, most people don’t consume much outbound bandwidth at all.

There’s a few reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’ll just focus on the show-stopper. People don’t think in terms of bits. Maybe a few of us technologists do, or can, or want to, but most people can’t, don’t want to, and won’t.

If ISPs start charging differentially for upstream traffic, I predict they will lose any potential savings just on the pure volume of customer support calls.

Technology newbie Aunt Millie doesn’t know whether that picture is a few kilobytes or two megabytes. She just wants to upload it. She also has no idea how much traffic Skype generates, she just wants to make free calls.

Even worse, she doesn’t understand how downloading a set of very large files, such as from iTunes or a video-on-demand site, causes acknowledgment traffic to flow upstream, adding to her upload bills.

Or what about those programs you install on your PC that “phone home” or periodically push information up to the net? Even a sophisticated user might not even be aware that this is happening…until he sees his bill.

You can charge people for access and you can charge them for discrete transactions. People understand these things. You can’t charge them for bits. You’ll just piss them off.

Flat rate pricing is the best thing that ever happened to the Internet, and it has been so successful and influential that telephony pricing has followed suit. It is the future, not the past.

Find a different way to make money.