Droopy- 19 Grin And Share It

It’s Toon nite…! Grab your popcorn, put your feet up on the seatback in front of ya, and aim your spitballs at the ushers please. This is Late Late Night Firedoglake, where off topic is the topic … so dive in.

What’s on your mind tonite…?

So, the Tea Party is going all out in their crusade to destroy America.

I agree with the White House via HuffPo:

…Congress has two jobs to do: pass budgets and pay the bills it has racked up. Republicans in Congress had the opportunity to pass a routine, simple continuing resolution that keeps the government running for a few more weeks. But instead, Republicans decided they would rather make an ideological point by demanding the sabotage of the health care law. Republicans have tried and failed to defund or delay the health care law more than 40 times, and they know this demand is reckless and irresponsible…

But wait, there’s more.  Saturday evening, they decided to go all in:

House Republicans have added a measure aimed at limiting contraceptive coverage…

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law four years ago, FOUR. Years. Ago.

Like the President says, ”Congress has two jobs to do: pass budgets and pay the bills it has racked up.”

Oh and No, David Gregory, Democrats aren’t part of the problem here:

“As Congress digs in over Obamacare and the budget, are both parties prepared to take the economy over the edge?” Like the President says, ”Congress has two jobs to do: pass budgets and pay the bills it has racked up.”

A couple of weeks ago, Yves Smith’s link roundup included a McClatchy piece about consumers dropping cable TV. She remarked: “Trust me, when you seem more consumers ditching cable, you’ll see the pipeline providers start charging based on how much you download a month.” Caps really aren’t necessary, though; connections are already capped by speed. You can’t download any more than the connection will allow. Consumers should be able to buy a connection at a set price, and the ISP should charge for it based on how much data it could transmit. Charge more for faster speeds, less for slower ones.

The big providers don’t want to do that, though, so instead they are trying to figure out ways to charge customers more for what they already pay for. And the amounts they are charging are exorbitant. For instance, Verizon Wireless’ HomeFusion service has a top tier of $120 a month for 30 GB, with a $10 charge for every gigabyte over that. Since, as the article notes, Netflix can take up to 700 MB for an hour of streaming, that cap will get blown through pretty quickly. And it’s completely inadequate for the next generation of video: you can forget about streaming a movie that takes 45 to 60 GB.

That’s not all of the bad news, either. Internet connections have traditionally worked like this: Select your package, pay for it, use it for what you want. That’s what you do with your ISP. That’s what Google does too. Everyone pays to get on. But now there’s an emerging talking point that web sites (for some reason called “edge providers” in a bit of unhelpfully obscure tech lingo) are somehow not paying to get on. Verizon is before the FCC right now arguing that prices are higher because edge providers – which, remember, already pay to get on the Internet – do not also pay to get off. In other words, when you use your Verizon connection to watch a YouTube video, YouTube is also somehow bundled in as a Verizon customer.

The reason they are doing this is because they want to do away with net neutrality. If lots of their customers are getting data from site A then site A is a problem. If only they didn’t have to connect their customers to it, or maybe if they could charge the site a premium! And that’s where usage based broadband pricing comes in. If Verizon succeeds against the FCC and net neutrality is gutted, web site owners face the prospect of being charged extra by providers for the privilege of delivering content to customers.

We are already seeing a version of that as providers make deals to serve certain content free of data cap usage. And when you’re on a plan that has a 30 GB per month cap with $1 for every GB over, that’s a pretty big deal. It begins to make sense to confine yourself to those sites that your ISP doesn’t count against your cap just to make sure you don’t accidentally blow through it. Of course, some take a more sanguine view:

The critics’ real worry, then, is that ESPN, by virtue of its size, could gain an advantage on some other sports content provider who chose not to offer a similar uncapped service. But is this government’s role – the micromanagement of prices, products, the structure of markets, and relationships among competitive and cooperative firms?

It’s a mighty expansive view of micromanagement that encompasses preventing monopolistic behavior and collusion of market leaders. Herding customers into walled gardens by forcing surcharges on unfavored sites and privileging others does not strike me as a victory for consumers – in fact, it is exactly the kind of circumstance an effective government regulator should take a very close interest in.

It’s also worth noting the industry’s apparent preference for wireless rollouts over wired ones in light of the more stringent net neutrality requirements for the latter. Verizon gave up on its wired FIOS service, and it isn’t hard to imagine the company breathing new life into it should the FCC case go its way. [cont'd.]