Telcos play the fear, uncertainty, and doubt card to avoid net neutrality rules

Today's Associated Press article titled "High-Definition Video Could Choke Internet" smells like a telco news release disguised as a story. The argument is a simple one: if consumers download more than a little high-definition video, the Internet will collapse. The sky is falling. Worse, the cost for telcos will go up.

What the article fails to mention is that consumers are currently being sold services by those same telcos promising flat-rate, multi-megabit downloads via DSL, so that they can compete with the cable internet service providers. Stories like these are attempts to change the flat-rate pricing model so that they can charge consumers more if they actually use the service. Sign up for a service, and then change the service offering after have signup so consumers pay more. In any industry other than telecom, this would be called bait and switch, pure and simple. And it would be illegal, just as car dealers raising the price of a car from that advertised is illegal.

One other point: notice that the service being trotted out as the bogey man here is HDTV. These same telcos who are claiming that there is no network Internet bandwidth for HDTV will also be happy to sell you a FIOS or IPTV HDTV subscription themselves. They just don't want consumers getting those services over the Internet without them getting their cut. So the notion that "The Internet can't handle it" rings a bit false in that context.

Consumers shouldn't forget that subscribers already have subsidized these telcos to build out fiber networks through tax incentives and other fees. And content providers aren't exactly thrilled about this situation either. Is it any wonder that both Warner Brothers and Apple are investigating using BitTorrent to distribute this type of content more efficiently using peer-to-peer technology?

Technorati Tags: Broadband, Internet, Marketing, Network neutrality, Telcos