Tabatha Southey's UBB? Oh, it stands for Unbelievable Business Baloney in the Feb 5th Globe and Mail, IMO, puts things in proper perspective--particularly the actual cost of delivering a gigabyte of broadband data (perhaps ten cents, compared to the $1 to $5 charged by some Canadian ISPs). Certainly, businesses have to make a reasonable profit. But up to 490%--while simultaneously (and ham-fistedly) dictating the business models of downstream players? Throw in the fact that the telecom/ISP industry is nothing less than an oligopoly--one colluding to shut out content-only competitors like Netflix?
Unacceptable. Particularly in light of the fact that the same industry is due to receive a tremendous bargain when the government opens up new swaths of the wireless spectrum. It's loonies to long-johns that false scarcities will be manufactured to multiply profits even further.
Thus I'm overjoyed that average Canadians had the great, good sense to call B.S. and raise a ruckus earlier this year. If nothing else, it served as the proverbial warning shot over the bow--with luck, one heard across the border.
But what I find particularly interesting--albeit in an orthogonal way--about the whole business is how it highlights the way the human mind conflates data and media: How quickly some associations can be formed, and--conversely--how difficult they can be to break. In a sense, we're seeing the echoes of how our European ancestors perceived the elaborately decorated medieval holy books or the fantastically jeweled reliquaries of of otherwise humble saints. (In the worst case scenario, we're thinking in terms of our monastery-sacking ancestors.)
I thought Ms Southey boiled it down nicely:
Applying supply-and-demand logic to this problem confuses people because information is infinite. Fear not, Canada, we’re not about to run out of this thing you call Internet. Internet’s not something you can save for your retirement. There are no children toiling away in data mines. There are no data slag heaps in Kentucky. We can consume data without guilt. It’s more like unrealized potential. It’s best to think of it this way: Whenever you watch a panda roll down a hill on YouTube, a billion pixels are set free.
I suppose that medium-to-content association is also why some people don't consider copying movies and music from friends "stealing." When you don't have the DVD/CD in hand, it's just invisible bytes on a hard drive you can't (normally) see anyway.
Or why some advocates of the DMCA vociferously opposed the legality of backup copies. I wish I could remember which politician made the analogy that ran something like "If I go to Pottery Barn and buy a plate and I drop it, I don't expect them to give me a new one for free."
It's entirely possible that my memory loss was due to my forehead repeatedly banging against the nearest sturdy object. Because the bottom line is that the content is what you're paying for (although I do consider liner notes a huge bonus). The medium is normally dictated by the market's lowest common denominator definition of "convenience"--wax cylinders, 33-/45-/77-rpm vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, hard drive, streaming and whatever's waiting for us down the pike.
That's a valid question. Which, to me, means that the linkage of message to medium is itself a valid thing to question. Always. Starting sooner than later. Simply because hardware drops in cost and increases in power for the major telecom players just like it does for us. Similarly, software is increasingly free--Android phones and *NIX servers being cases in point. Just like it is for us. And let's not forget how the (particularly spendy) human dimension of delivering bytes is being offshored to lower-cost environments. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for us. Only think what we would be charged if we tried dialing Hyderabad or Manila on our own dime--me, I think a double-standard's clearly at work here.
In short, technology is moving too quickly and too globally to allow an oligopoly to drag either present or future down with false scarcities. But it would be much worse if we colluded with the gatekeepers of the internet by thinking that the delivery mechanism is more valuable than the payload.
