Pseudo-trends

One of the things that I find hard to quantify, but just kind of sense are these "trends," that usually are the work of some PR campaign. They get sprinkled around in all these various newspapers, but are more like "seeded." It's hard to see the pattern without doing some serious Nexis'ing, so that's why I say it's hard to quantify.

So I'll probably just declare a pseudo-trend, and leave it up to the reader to do the homework.

The latest psuedo-trend is "the Internet is about to blow up!" Since the Internets are about to explode, we should let the telecoms do whatever it takes to protect their ability to deliver our pornography in HD. Needless to say, it usually entails dropping a lot of regulatory hurdles that are currently being protected under the general rubric of "net neutrality."

Here's an example:

Too many video files could choke Internet

Step 1: Gin up a crisis:

You may be up for it, but is the Internet? The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is "no." Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

...if the customer starts watching Internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth's cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.

Step 2: Propose a solution:

To deal with that, Kafka said says BellSouth might put caps on the amount of data that a residential user gets for free, and charge extra if the user goes over, much like cell phone users pay overages. Other options include charging content providers extra for guaranteed delivery, the kind of model that has raised the hackles of Internet content providers and activists.

To Mr. Svensson's credit, he does give the last word to those "content providers and activists":

[Editor of the DSL Prime newsletter Dave] Burstein believes the danger of letting the carriers charge extra for guaranteed delivery is that they'll put the spending for upgrades into creating that extra "toll lane," and won't reduce oversubscription in the rest of the network even though it would be cheap to do so.

Close enough, I guess...