Rebuttal to Mark Goldberg’s Response

On March 23 2011, Mark Goldberg posted a response on his blog to my video “The UBB Deception” where he objected to many of the items presented in the video, even calling the entire presentation a propaganda piece.

This is the propaganda piece’s rebuttal to his post.

We’ll begin with what he calls my “pseudo-facts” concerning networking equipment. I stated in my video that networking equipment doesn’t really care how much data actually flows through them. Not only do I stand by this statement, it is “in fact” the case not only with enterprise and industrial equipment, but also with consumer grade equipment such as home routers.

Mr. Goldberg used home routers as an example of network congestion, mistakenly believing that if two people in a household tried to watch a high definition on-line video at the same time, the home network will have trouble handling the load. However, what actually becomes congested is only the Internet connection itself. If you were to transfer huge amounts of data between two computers connected to the same home network, the speed of the data transfer will be on average between five and ten times faster than the transfer speed over the Internet.

Your home router is not suffering from congestion problems. It’s actually being underused.

Moving on to the corporate side of things, enterprise and industrial networking equipment — when properly configured and maintained — can handle between 0% and 100% data transfer rates with no ill effects and no increased operating costs. The gear is neither a high pressure pipe nor a high voltage electrical conduit, so it simply can’t wear down from the data flow.

And under the (very) rare circumstances when there is network congestion, the gear just shrugs it off, and most users don’t even notice the congestion.

Corporate level Internet services are used by many businesses such as financial institutions, retail chains, television channels, and yes, other Internet service providers. The gear can handle just about anything you throw at it at minimal fixed costs, which includes hundreds of thousands of individual users, but again only if the equipment is properly configured and maintained. That’s how it works in a competitive and competent business environment.

Or at least that’s how it should work, which makes you wonder what’s the problem with the large corporations that constantly complain about experiencing congestion issues on their internal networks, the same networks under which Usage-Based Billing will apply.

What? You didn’t know that Usage-Based Billing had absolutely nothing to do with the Internet itself? And that UBB is all about adding a highly lucrative revenue stream to their existing internal network, a network for which third-party Internet service providers already pay for their access in full each and every month?

Someone must have skipped over that part during the CRTC hearings.

It’s nice to see that Mr. Goldberg is so concerned over the budget limited customers who, under my speed based pricing philosophy, might never enjoy the benefits of higher speed tiers because of the extra cost. Too bad he fails to mention that under the existing UBB pricing scheme, not only are the higher speed tiers still more expensive than the lower speed tiers, the same deprived low speed customers will now be charged as much as five dollars per Gigabyte if they ever go over their already ridiculously low monthly data allowances!

“Sorry kids! It’s macaroni & cheese night again!”

Let’s be realistic here. Does it really cost the large corporations up to $5 per Gigabyte to transfer data over a private network that they own and control? And if the large corporations are experiencing congestion problems caused by the 6% market share the independents currently possess – congestion that has yet to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in any public forum – then maybe the large corporations should have never oversold their network capacity in the first place, or at the very least have hired people competent enough to properly manage their network infrastructures so they wouldn’t find themselves in a pile of congestion issues in the first place.

I make no apologies for mentioning the former and future positions of the CRTC commissioners in my video. I had to find a quick way to point out that these individuals find themselves in a position of conflict of interest every time they preside over matters that can affect the prospects of their former and future employers. If the CRTC were operated more like a courtroom however, the affected commissioners would have no other choice but to sit out of any proceedings where they can be unduly influenced by their former or future ties with the participants.

And if, like in a courtroom, the participants were under oath with the possibility of criminal charges and prison time for committing perjury in front of the Commission, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about the possibility of the participants lying to the Commission in order to achieve their goals, something which is now extremely easy to do simply by filing your paperwork “in confidence.”

The decision over Usage-Based Billing is possibly the worst decision the Commission has ever made in its entire history, one that even I had never expected considering my extremely positive experiences with the Commission during these last few years. This decision now allows the owners of the “last mile” to charge exorbitant and unreasonable usage fees for access to a private network which already generates a profit each and every month, with the added benefit of protecting the large corporations’ non-Internet based media outlets, and possibly wipe out what little competition this nation already has.

At the very least, Usage-Based Billing should have never been imposed on the independent ISPs who already pay in full for their access to the internal network each and every month. But now, we run the very high risk of ending up with no Internet competition at all, and be forced to choose between no Internet service and no cash in our pockets.

And as demonstrated at the end of my video, no control over our own nation.

Think about that during the upcoming election campaign.