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. @#$#@$@

Useful to see how the carriers think. They discover free capacity, then invent magical ways of billing us for using it:

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.?

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!