A demystified idea of market proportion - oh, and ILEC fraud
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
Interesting, from Pogue (whom I rarely read any more):
text messages are pure profit for the cell carriers. Text messaging itself was invented when a researcher found "free capacity on the system" in an underused secondary cellphone channel: http://bit.ly/QxtBt. They may cost you and the recipient 20 cents each, but they cost the carriers pretty much zip. @#$#@$@
Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.
This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.
"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn."Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system." ^&*^(
To charge for it sounds a little like sub-prime mortgage chicanery. Magical Fuck-the-Customer Money. (It took a move by Google to get someone in the press interested enough to mention it?) *
I grow tedious in the retelling: If the ILECs, the carriers, will go to great lengths to bill us for something that's no cost to them (inventing elaborate "choose your style" billing formats for the sake of verisimilitude, no doubt) how much profit are they making from their Pipes? And if they exuberantly produce surplus profits ex nihilo, then what will be their response when Content Big and small start charging us to access their news, information, "entertainment," etc.?
I grow tedious in the retelling: If the ILECs, the carriers, will go to great lengths to bill us for something that's no cost to them (inventing elaborate "choose your style" billing formats for the sake of verisimilitude, no doubt) how much profit are they making from their Pipes? And if they exuberantly produce surplus profits ex nihilo, then what will be their response when Content Big and small start charging us to access their news, information, "entertainment," etc.?
When every purveyor of "meaning" will be trying to make a buck, who of us will be able to afford the bogus carrier charges, the fraudulent texting fees, and the absurdly exaggerated content fees? When will these Incorporated Content Inc. folks begin to understand that this is not broadcast, this is not Big Content, this is micro / nano / distracted / serendipitous activity? One does not look at everything on the NY Times site the way some New Yawkers probably still read every page of the print edition as if it were just unearthed at Qumran. One often does not even see its front page. One comes to it via google news, or as in this case, via Humorzo, who receives nothing from Mr. Pogue or the Times for linking to them.
What if the Times, content provideur nonpareil that it is, were to discover that people are coming to it only because they're getting tipped to something by a blogger, or a youtuber, or, gulp, Homo Twitteriensis? That its sense of the market, of how it works and what to expect from it, is off by several orders of magnitude? Perhaps by as many orders of magnitude as the gratuitous profits being made by the carriers for their phantom texting costs?
What if Big Content has as exaggeratedly an incorrect sense of its value as we have of the ILECs' price-to-cost ratio for texting? Could it accept the truth of that? Really eat it, digest it, and then pay the fuckers on Twitter who send people to its huge brand?
*It seens it was reported on last December by Randall Stross, but apparently no one cared (and why doesn't Pogue link to Stross's scoop?).
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
Labels: cluster fuck with clyster pipes, comcast, content monetization, ilecs, New York Times, News Corp. Verizon
posted by Tom Matrullo at Thursday, August 06, 2009
5 Comments:
What a very excellent set of questions, and blog post (one to which I will return several times to read and think).
I remain (confounded or astonished, not sure which) at how, and to what extent, corporate America can ring-fence, coopt, exploit and then control.
I suppose I shouldn't be (confounded or astonished), as this is how massive corporations and now essentially, by default, the thing that is America has been built. It's the way things are done. Iit could be different, as you and others have pointed out, but it is not.
..."to what extent, corporate America can ring-fence, coopt, exploit and then control."
Yes, and the corollary, to what extent USians allow themselves to be fenced, coopted, exploited, and controlled. It's as if the economic/cultural default is set to "idiot."
Slightly less vituperously: The Telcos discovered free capacity and enabled texting, and created a market out of that vortex of conversation.
But is there a market where the customer pays for something that costs nothing? Doesn't this sound like, well, the opposite of what the RIAA has been going on about? Paying nothing for something, or something for nothing, seems to be characteristic, structural of the Net as we know it.
In both instances, there is Fiat value. In one case, the corporate TElcos are coining money just as Bernanke does - only he has to, to keep the economy from collapsing.
In the other case, the customer is taking possession of something the RIAA (etc) consider property.
Only, the RIAA feels it mere duty to sue Mr. Tenenbaum. Why do the texting multitudes not think it advisable to sue the Telcos?
But is there a market where the customer pays for something that costs nothing? Doesn't this sound like, well, the opposite of what the RIAA has been going on about? Paying nothing for something, or something for nothing, seems to be characteristic, structural of the Net as we know it.
In both instances, there is Fiat value.
Yes .. where there is today, and increasingly, value is in that ability (Legislative, lobbying, arcane instruments, nano-second trading advantages, actual relationsips between Wall St, Fed and WH, etc.) to coopt, exploit and control especially when it is not visible and less-than-idiot-proof with respect to being understood.
A micro-micro analogy of sorts .. I remember being a volunteer mentor in a venture business plan / start-up competition where the main innovation or business coup of the winning two-or-three-person start-up (which was creating the first generation of games for mobility devices (then called cellphones) was to have found, or created through negotiation with the Telcos, the ability to have the downloading and usage of its first few games tracked, metered AND billed for by the Telco IN the billing infrastructure of the Telco, thereby essentially guaranteeing the tiny start-up a decent and guaranteed cash flow which would increase with every single burst and bit of activity.
THAT .. the embedding in the billing infrastructure by dint of good or 'smart' negotiating on the part of the two young co-founders ... was the basic 'special sauce' of the fledgling business.
So much of what is going on is about controlling various kinds ... diameters, ingredients that flow within, places where things can be metered .. of pipes, as you have so clearly pointed out re: content, users and pipes.
Yes, contracts with the owners of the Pipes would have to be the way to go.
So... why doesn't the RIAA leave Mr. Tenenbaum alone, and go after the rip-off profits the TElcos make from texting? Sort of a fungible economic backflip with a half gainer, in which in exchange for paying for texting, which costs nothing, customers would pay nothing to download music, videos, in short, so-called intelprop. Why not?
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