Thread by @doctorow

All right folks, let's talk about zero rating, provisioning, network management, #NetNeutrality and the convenient myth of the "bandwidth hog"

To understand anything, you must first understand that there is no such thing as a private company that builds telcoms infrastructure with its own money. Every telcoms company is the recipient of massive public subsidies.

That's because any company that had to buy the right to every foot of sidewalk, every mile of transnational railtrack-trench, piecemeal, on the open market, would spend a trillion dollars and still never be done.

So telcoms companies beg the public to give them the equivalent of more than a trillion dollars in subsidy, in exchange for a promise to operate a network with that subsidy that gives the public the communications services it needs.

Obviously, once someone gives you a trillion dollars' worth of in-kind capital subsidy, it's not hard to operate a profitable business. But how profitable?

That depends on how much you charge, and how much of what you charge you give back to the public in the form of ongoing capital improvements (installing fiber and lighting it up, etc), vs how much you return to management and shareholders in salaries, buybacks & dividencs

All other things being equal, the stable equilibrium that for-profit subsidy receiving telcoms find is to put in the very smallest amount of capital maintenance & improvement, at the threshold at which people rebel and demand regulatory relief

(or turn to exotic substitutes like microwave line-of-site gigabit, which stops working when it rains, but at least is better than the starved, looted service an unregulated telcoms monopoly will deliver)

(also: duopolies are functionally equivalent to monopolies here - AT&T and Comcast are perfectly capable of converging on the same starve-and-loot strategy in the absence of new entrants and/or effective regulation)

tl;dr: publicly subsidized private monopolists would rather pay dividends than improve service

Here's where the #NetNeutrality comes in: a company that starves its infrastructure can easily find itself in a situation of bandwidth shortage. A competitive company under meaningful regulation would divert some of its profits to infrastructure

But in the absence of NN rules that company can take the bizarre position that the problem isn't its shitty, starved, crumbling network: it's that its customers are USING THE INTERNET WRONG

"You're a bandwidth hog" is monopolist-speak for, "My network would be more profitable if you'd pay me for it, but not actually try to use it."

Here is the reality: everything we do today involves the internet. Everything we do tomorrow will REQUIRE it. There will never be a time at which the infrastructural demands on networks are less intense than they are now

From this day on, telcoms will have MORE demands on their infrastructure, not less. Those demands will be driven needs far more fundamental on Maslow's pyramid than Netflix.

In the absence of #netneutrality, the carriers' response will always be rationing (and choosing winners by demanding bribes from firms who don't want to be rationed) and never provisioning

In the absence of #NetNeutrality, any management team that invests a dime in provisioning that couldn't be returned in buybacks or dividends will be replaced

The market reality of telcoms is, if it's not more expensive to ration than to provision, companies will always choose rationing. In a world of natural monopolies, the only way to raise the price of rationing is to make it illegal.

"Bandwidth hog" is a way of transforming people who want to use the internet they're paying for into people who should shut up and take what they're given

Literally the only way to avoid bandwidth congestion is to add bandwidth. Anything else is rent-seeking disguised as tinkering in the margins