As I have argued many times before (see 1, 2, 3, 4), some sort of usage-based bandwidth metering or consumption cap makes a lot of sense as a way to deal with broadband network traffic management. So, if this is the direction that Comcast is heading--and this recent Broadband Reports piece suggests that it is--that is fine with me. The article says it might work as follows:

A Comcast insider tells me the company is considering implementing very clear monthly caps, and may begin charging overage fees for customers who cross them. While still in the early stages of development, the plan -- as it stands now -- would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap. Users would get one free "slip up" in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has "a lot of momentum behind it," and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two.

"The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently," says an insider familiar with the project, who prefers to remain anonymous. "As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially." According to this source, the new system should only impact some 14,000 customers out of Comcast's 14.1 million users (i.e. the top 0.1%).

It's always been my hope that we could potentially head-off burdensome Net neutrality regulations by encouraging carriers to deal with the problem of excessive bandwidth consumption by using time-tested price discrimination solutions instead of the sort of packet management techniques that are the subject of such heated debate today. Of course, on one of our old podcasts on Net neutrality issues, Richard Bennett pointed out to me that this still might not alleviate the need for other types of traffic management techniques to be used. And he also pointed out that the very small subset of true bandwidth hogs are almost entirely heavy BitTorrent users, so perhaps the way Comcast was dealing with them was just another way of skinning the same cat.

Several of the installments in my ongoing "Media DE-consolidation" series have involved Time Warner taking apart the media mega-company it created back in 2000. [See, for example, parts 12, 14 and 21]. The relationship was a bit rocky right from the start, and things have been unraveling slowly ever since. You will recall the amazing front page story in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 in which Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes declared the death of “synergy” and, more poignantly, Bewkes went so far as to call synergy “bull—t”!

Today, another major split occurred when, as many had anticipated for some time now, TW announced the spin-off of its Time Warner Cable unit. Here's the NYT's summary:

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, continued to trim what has for years been the world’s largest media company by announcing Wednesday that it would completely spin off its cable company. The news — which was not unexpected and follows an earlier transaction in which a portion of the cable unit was spun off into a separate public company — came as Time Warner reported quarterly earnings that were largely in line with Wall Street’s expectations. “We’ve decided that a complete structural separation of Time Warner Cable, under the right circumstances, is in the best interests of both companies’ shareholders,” Mr. Bewkes said Wednesday in a statement. “We’re working hard on an agreement with Time Warner Cable, which we expect to finalize soon.”

Bruce Owen, America's preeminent media economist--with apologies to Harold Vogel, who at least deserves an honorable mention--has written another splendid piece for Cato's Regulation magazine, this one entitled, "The Temptation of Media Regulation."

This latest essay deals primarily with the many fallacies surrounding so-called "a la carte" regulation of the video marketplace, and I encourage you to read it to see Owen's powerful refutation of the twisted logic behind that regulatory crusade. But I wanted to highlight a different point that Bruce makes right up front in his essay because it is something I am always stressing in my work too.

In some of my past work on free speech and media marketplace regulation, I have argued that there is very little difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to these issues. They are birds of feather who often work closely together to regulate speech and media. Whether it is broadcast 'indecency' controls; proposals to extend those controls to cable & satellite TV; campaign finance laws; efforts to limit or rollback ownership regulations; or even must carry and a la carte, the story is always the same: It's one big bipartisan regulatory love fest. [And the same goes for regulation of the Internet, social networking sites, and video games.]

Owen explains why that is the case:

Bruce Everiss, a UK-based video game industry veteran, and author of the blog Bruce on Games, has penned a comprehensive essay on video game piracy through the years. I recommend you read the entire piece, but here's the take away:

And the game industry continues to grow and prosper, despite the piracy. This is because the proliferation of platforms allows publishers to more easily abandon platforms that are pirated to the point of being uneconomic. Instead they concentrate on platforms where there are windows of opportunity to run a viable business. Either because the anti piracy technology is on top or because there is a sufficient number of honest customers to get a return, even sometimes with a heavily pirated platform. Games with an online element can often be made very pirate proof which has been a major incentive for developers to go down this route.

So for 25 years or so game players have been stealing games in truly massive numbers with zero chance of being caught and punished for their crime. Very often far more copies of a game title have been pirated than have been bought. This self evidently causes harm to the games industry, ultimately leading to less money being invested in games for the pirated platform. So, the game player suffers for his theft by having less games and lower quality games. All pretty obvious to anyone but the pirates who make all sorts of feeble excuses to justify their stealing.

[My own views on video game piracy can be found here and here.]

The Britannica Blog has been running an absolutely terrific series of essays on “Newspapers & the Net,” which is examining the questions: "Are newspapers dead? Should we care?" The series kicks off with essays from three of my absolute favorite bloggers: Nick Carr, Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen, who is the author of the amazing blog, PressThink. I highly recommend that you read all the installments, however. Here's the rundown of participants and essays in the series thus far:

I have generally agreed with Clay Shirky (and Tim Lee) that micropayments either don't work very well or just aren't needed given other pricing options / business models. But my eBay activity over the past few years has made me reconsider. I was going back through some of my past eBay purchases tonight and leaving feedback and I realized that I have made dozens of micropayments in recent months for all sorts of nonsense (stickers, posters, small car parts, Legos for my kids, magazines, and much more). Most of these items are just a few bucks, and many don't even break the 99-cent threshold. I think that qualifies as micropayment material. And certainly I am not the only one engaged in such micro-transactions because there are countless items on eBay for a couple of bucks or less.

Of course, just because micropayments and PayPal work marvelously in the context of the used junk and trinkets we find on eBay, that does not necessarily mean they will work as effectively for many forms of media content. Advertising or flat user fees are probably still preferable since consumers don't like the hassles associated with micropayments. Still, they seem to be working fine on eBay, so it would be wrong to claim that they never work online.

Broadcasting & Cable notes that:

"The fraternity of the nation’s television critics at daily newspapers was once a thriving milieu, dominated by a great diversity of committed voices. The critics’ opinions were sought, revered -- in many cases, even feared -- and blurbed in network on-air promos. That reality has changed drastically of late as the ranks of critics have grown noticeably leaner. Caught in the financial turmoil roiling the newspaper industry, they have become a beleaguered lot, a growing part of the collateral damage of the digital revolution. In the past two years, more than one-dozen longtime critics at major-market dailies -- including the Dallas Morning News, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, New York Newsday, New York Daily News and Houston Chronicle -- have been either let go, shunted to different beats or been forced to take the ubiquitous buyout..."

(1) Growing outlet competition and audience fragmentation: There's just a lot more to read, watch and listen to now, so something's got to give.

(2) Continued decline of newspaper business in general: For reason #1, newspapers are hurting and losing revenue. [see James Gattuso's recent post on this]. That has meant ongoing staff cuts, and critics (TV, music, art, or otherwise) are likely to be the first with their heads on the chopping blocks.

(3) Explosion of independent voice & critics via blogosphere: Finally, anyone can be a critic these days. That does not mean anyone can be a good critic--there are plenty of blithering idiots out there in the blogosphere when it comes to armchair media criticism--but there are many "amatuers" who do a fine job critiquing mass media programming (especially television).

So, while I am sad to seem some mainstream critics struggling, I just don't see this newspaper beat surviving much longer.

Today and tomorrow I am attending a terrific conference at Penn State University called, “Playing to Win: The Business and Social Frontiers of Videogames.” It features panel discussions about various legal and business issues facing the video game industry, as well as discussions about how video games are used to aid teaching and learning. There are also panels on multiplayer online worlds and virtual reality environments and the issues surrounding both. [They will apparently be posting videos from the conference on their site shortly.]

The folks at PSU were kind enough to invite me to deliver the luncheon keynote on Day 1 and I decided to provide a broad overview of the policy issues facing video games that I have covered in some of my past work. My presentation was entitled, "Video Games, Ratings, Parental Controls, & Public Policy: Where Do We Stand?" and the entire 36-slide presentation is now available online here. Down below, I thought I would just outline a couple of the key themes I touched upon in my presentation.

One of the installments in my ongoing Media Metrics series was called "Ad Wars" and in it I discussed the radical changes underway in the modern advertising market. And in a subsequent installment in the series entitled "Changing Fortunes," I made it clear that we are already seeing the ramifications of these changes for some of the nation's oldest media providers, especially broadcasters.

On that point, Diane Mermigas, one of the finest media market watchers in America, has a piece up today about how the "Recession + Google = Critical Blow To Broadcasters." She argues that:

I love these opening lines in Jose Antonio Vargas's article this morning about the vigorous online conversation that has been taking place about race, Barack Obama, and the controversy regarding past remarks made by his friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

In the church of the Internet, call him the preacher heard all around our YouTubing world, where believers not only watch the videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial and racially charged sermons but also edit them, comment on them, pass them around. And make them their own.

Wright's homilies -- including the one where he says "God damn America" -- have taken on a new life, opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it. It's about race, Sen. Barack Obama, the presidential campaign, us.

Think about that line for a moment: "opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it." In a few of my recent essays about the annual State of the News Media report as well as Andrew Keen's rants against "amateur" media, I have argued that we should appreciate just how much better our deliberative democracy is today thanks to the Internet, new media technologies, and user-generated content. Some critics bemoan the fact that we no longer have a handful of media intermediaries moderating or filtering that conversation, but this Obama-Wright issue provides us with a wonderful case study about why that thinking is so utterly misguided. As Vargas suggests, a conversation about race and politics is a conversation about us as a people; as a society. Shouldn't, therefore, "we the people" all be able to have our voices heard in that conversation in one way or another? The Internet enables that, and we are better off for it. Thirty years ago, 3 big networks and a few newspapers would have determined the confines and duration of this discussion. Today, we do.