Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Cable Market Power For Dummies

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Most folks outside of Washington DC still find their cable company an obnoxious monopoly, despite the presence of competitors like DirecTV, Dish Network, and the occassional overbuilder like RCN. But, despite the fact that customers express far more satisfaction with satellite and overbuilder service, most folks remain subscribed to cable. What gives? And how does cable get away with raising prices and favoring affiliated programming in the face of this “vigorous competition.” Needless to say, the cable folks respond with a host of fancy economic papers that they file with the FCC and present to members of Congress.

My own impression, having spoken with a number of economists, is that the Cable Cos use economics the same way Creationists use intelligent design. The point isn’t to engage in real scientific inquiry. The point is to throw enough scientific sounding stuff out there to confuse the issue and make people believe there are two equally valid sides to the debate. My problem is that the FCC and Congress usually end up playing the the Dover School District Board rather than Judge Jones.

Anyway, in an attempt to cut through some of the nonesense, MAP released a white paper of my authorship yesterday: “The Switching Equation” and Its Impact on the Video Proramming Market and MVPD Pricing. As you can tell by the title, even an attempt to write a simple, plain language version of this ends up more complicated than I’d like. (Sad fact is, economics is hard.)

So here’s the short version — most people find it such a pain in the butt to switch from one service to another that they will put up with higher prices, worse programming, and worse customer service rather than kill two days futzing with unsubscribing to cable and resubscribing to someone else. As long as cable doesn’t stink too badly, they can keep enough market power to make it even harder for competitors by cutting exclusive deals for regional sports programming and jacking up the price of video on demand to competitors (Comcast and Time Warner own 78% of iN Demand, the leading supplier of VoD). If we want real competition, we need to have rules that actually address market power and make it easier for people to switch to competitors. Otherwise, we get a lot of empty rhetoric about “level playing field” and “free market” and blah blah, and we still pay ridiculously high prices for cable and broadband service that still suck.

You want proof? Go read the paper.

Stay tuned . . .

My Thoughts Exactly:
Land of the formerly free, home of protofascism

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Cindy Sheehan, on her eviction from the People’s House:


I told him that my son died there. That’s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm’s way for still? For this? I can’t even wear a shrit that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.

Read it and weep.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Down to the wire in Indiana

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The press has not generally covered the fight in Indiana over their telecom dereg bill, known in the Indiana Senate as SB 245. What coverage there has been has primarily focused on deregulating phone rates or elimination of local franchising of video offerings (i.e., the new telco video products will not need local franchsies). Few stories have observed that Chapter 35 of SB 245, as drafted, would hamstring the ability of local governments to either provide broadband services directly or do so through partnerships with others.

The version of SB 245 that passed the Senate included minor modifications to Chapter 35. In the Indiana House of Representatives, the House eliminated both Chapter 35 and the state franchising provisions. The bill has now gone back to the Senate.

I want to urge folks in Indiana, and elsewhere if you do business in Indiana or otherwise have a connection to the state, to make your views known to the Senate. In I hope people and organizations will tell the Indiana State senators that anything that impedes the flexibility of localities to create effective broadband strategies, such as Chapter 35, cannot be good for the people of Indiana.

I have included a draft letter below. Please feel free to print out or in any other way use it to help stop Chapter 35 of SB 245.

This is also a good time for me to stress that, as usual, I speak only on behalf of myself and not my employer or Wetmachine.

Stay tuned . . . .

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Too geeky even for Wetmachine

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For all you progressive’s who remember the TV Show Babylon 5, I wrote this on my LJ.

Back in the mid-1990s, it amused me no end to see know-it-alls pound on [series creator] J. Michael Straczinsky for the ridiculous idea that the government could shift from democratic to essentially a military dictatorship in so short a time, simply by leveraging the fear of “alien influences” assaulting our “way of life.” “Ho ho ho,” they laughed. “That trick may work on others, but it couldn’t happen in a real democracy like the U.S. I mean, if the President started to intrude on people’s rights and civil liberties, started locking them up and holding them for years without pressing charges, or started spying on his own people, no one would sit still for it! He’d be out on his ear when everyone rose up in protest.”

Sadly, I think JMS may end up with the last laugh, although I doubt he will find saying “told ya so” much comfort.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
What the $#@! is the “Public” Internet

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So here I am, at one of these DC discussion fests between “stakeholders” on “network neutrality.” Net neutrality is what we talk about post Brand X . It means the provider can’t mess with the packets (other than to screen malware or engage in network management). Needless to say, the incumbent wireline providers are not happy with this thought, while all the time proclaiming they will never, ever mess with content.

So what incumbents float instead is the concept of providing “enhanced service” to those with content who will pay extra to be given “priority” to the broadband provider’s subscribers. (“Hey, nice packets you got there. Be a shame if anything . . . happened to them on the way to the customer. But good news. We’re here to offer you a ‘premium’ service that gaurantees you speedy delivery! I suppose I shouldn’t mention this, but your competitor has already signed up . . .”)

This is being justified, in part, as offering premium service on the “private internet” as opposed to the “public interent.”

What the #$@! is a “public internet?” Unless there is some remnant of the NSF backbone out there, or we’re talking about the government funded root servers, there is no such thing as a “public” internet and never was. “The Internet” (back when everyone always used to capitalize it) is a “network of networks” which, since the mid-1990s, have been private networks.

So why are wireline incumbents pushing the “public internet” meme? See below . . .

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Neutrino:
The War on the Consumer: Congress to Pass Secret DRM Law?

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I guess I’ll make this into a reoccurring feature, since everyone seemed to like the last one I did, and it seems we have no end of stupidity from media companies and their hired hands.

So, let’s see what the media companies have been shopping for in Washington. I bet there’s a lot of post-Holidays sales of legislation going on…

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Register here to claim your phony “freedom”

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The registered traveler program, in which people surrender a bit of themselves into the maw of the Overmind in exchange for some bogus promise of “security” is so obviously bad that I’m not going to belabor it here. Here’s an artilcle that pricks the surface of why this program is stupid and dangerous — and asks the question, how long will it remain “voluntary”?

One of the things that’s always puzzled me about the Transportaion Security Agency is why people — good guys and bad guys alike, evidently– consider mass transportation the default target for attack. If bad guys started blowing up shopping malls would we then have to create a Shopping Security Agency and have our retninas scanned before being allowed to shop?

Like John Gilmore, I think that the TSA has a lot more to do with conditioning people to surrender privacy and freedom of movement to The Authorities than it does with increasing our safety. I distrust, emphatically distrust, the TSA and all its ilk, but I’m willing to admit that there may be some benefit derived from it to counterbalance the incipient totalitarianism it presages and prepares the way for, like John the Baptist making smooth the way for the One Who Was to Come. But as for the Registered Traveler program in particular, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Inventing the Future:
Touchability Cues

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When I wrote “Touchability,” it had already been a while since a buddy had shown me a haptic mouse he was working on. For example, you could feel an actual bump when the mouse enters and leaves an object (a real version of what developers sometimes call rollover). Force feedback was such an obviously good thing that I didn’t even mention then the cool stuff that’s now happening in this area.

As much as I think physical touchability is good, I want to be clear that I want to make Croquet applications be emotionally touchable, too. I want to capture what it is that makes things seem (be?) real. Even without physical force feedback, it should still be fun to fondle stuff because of active visual and aural responses and good 3D design.

To be sure, I’d love to add to the effect with more sensory stimulus. There are huge possibilities, and I hope folks will explore them. This stuff is cool. There’s someone working on stereo display for Croquet. Others working on large screens in public spaces. I don’t doubt that we’ll see Croquet on small or cheap devices. There’s plenty of room for innovation.

My Thoughts Exactly:
Strange Fruit Heartbreaker

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OK I’ll admit that I watch football, NFL (USian) football sometimes, especially now these recent years when my local team the Patriots, also known as the Massachusetts Liberals, have been kicking ass left right and central (and also teams from Texas, such as the Houston Halliburtons and the Dallas Swaggering Ignorami, have generally sucked–an extra bonus).

So I have not been able to avoid noticing that the Rolling Stones will be playing the half-time extravaganza at the SuperDuperBowl this year, because during other NFL games on TV, approximately every three bleeping minutes there’s another “Rolling Stones at SuperDuperBowl” commercial. Which their playing this gig is not a bad thing in itself, I guess, since although the Rolling Stones have indeed intermittently been over the last several decades just what they claimed to be, that is, The Greatest RockaRoll Band inna World, they’ve never been celebrated for their good taste, so why shouldn’t they highlight the world’s largest annual celebration of the aesthetic of kitsch?

But the use of their song “Heartbreaker” to market the SuperDuperBowl is deeply sad and offensive to me. And I don’t mean in the way Led Zep selling Cadillacs or the Who selling whatever, or even Bob Dylan selling investment portfolio management, for the love of Christ, with “The Times They Are A-Changing” is sad and offensive. It’s more as if Billie Holiday were to have used her song Strange Fruit to market Fruit Loops cereal or strawberry Pop Tarts.

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