Reading people write about something that they know little about but who don’t realize how little they know is always painful.

I’m not going to talk about all of these “points” – who has the time – but I’ll hit a few of the major ones.

Here’s the problem: ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner want to charge additional fees to companies like Netflix and Google that use a lot of bandwidth.

This is not how it works. Netflix and Google only send traffic to an ISP when that ISPs customer requests it (which Kevin later states, but seems not to understand what that means fully). The only reason any bits at all flow from Google or Netflix to Comcast is because someone on Comcast’s network clicked on or opened a Google page or visited Netflix.

Comcast’s customers have already paid for this bandwidth when they purchased a certain amount of connectivity a month from Comcast. This is not some revolutionary change. This is how the internet is designed and is how it has always worked. Again, as some people seem to miss this point, Comcast’s customers have already paid for this bandwidth, and on their end, Netflix has already paid for it, too.

Kevin’s misapprehensions and incomprehension shows how effective ISP propaganda has been that a relatively smart person like him has been so misled and deluded about basic facts.

This isn’t a matter of opinion. There are no opinions here. This is just history, and network engineering.

The obvious solution here is also an old one: since end users are the ones requesting the bits, charge them for bandwidth.

The end users are already getting charged – in fact overcharged – for bandwidth. Most now have onerous bandwidth caps, too. This is already happening. Does Kevin think users should be charged more for bandwidth than they currently are, when cable company profits are already at record highs and US users are charged far more for less bandwidth than most other countries in the world?

Not very progressive, really.

The rest of the piece isn’t very good, either, but also isn’t very quotable. However it seems to labor under the delusion that there is some shortage of bandwidth in the US. There is not. This is just an attempt to eliminate competition from Netflix and to squeeze out more profits however possible.

In reality with some very small ISP upgrades, in almost all cases less than a few hundred thousand dollars for millions of customers, all of these Netflix bandwidth “problems” would magically vanish. Just as when Netflix was extorted by Comcast and the streaming speeds suddenly improved. Trust me, no one was running cable down the street in the middle of the night. All Comcast did was turn up another port on a router somewhere.

Again, I am always shocked at how effective propaganda is. This is another example of it. Kevin doesn’t really understand how the internet works, what the issues are, or what is already occurring, or any of the technology at all.

The corporations have screamed loudly and long enough that even someone relatively on top of things and aware of the issues to some extent is nearly completely operating in the framework that ISPs wish him to. The same is true of most of the commenters on the post. There are so uninformed or poorly informed that it is almost physically painful to read their drivel.

There truly is no hope, really.