For some years now the US Internet providers have been compelled to comply with the conditions of the DCMA in which their customers can be prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement based on very fragile evidence. The ISPs seem, to my mind, to have been very helpful to the music industry and focussed few resources on helping their customers.
Now in the UK we have the announcement in the FT that we’re getting a similar voluntary regime here. The BPI (the local equivalent of the music industry body) will monitor the file sharing networks and pass the IP addresses of ‘offenders’ on to the ISPs. The ISPs will, at first, send warning letters but clearly this will escalate to ‘repeat offenders’ being booted from the Internet and possibly have criminal charges brought against them.
Why are the ISPs so compliant here? It’s simple economics.
There are 2 ways in the UK an ISP carries traffic between the Internet and their customers. Smaller ISPs buy wholesale access to the end users from BT Wholesale. They pay a per user fee and also a per megabyte charge based on the overall volume of traffic between themselves and the user. It doesn’t matter if that’s Internet traffic or simply email delivered from the ISPs local mail server.
Larger ISPs place DSLAMs (big boxes that terminate DSL lines) into exchanges about the country and then buy backhaul links from those exchanges to their data centres (this is the process of unbundling). They pay Openreach a fixed fee per user and for the backhaul links based on link capacity. Most large ISPs also infill the places in the country where they have not unbundled by reselling the same BT Wholesale services as the smaller ISPs.
The vast majority of ISP end user contracts are fixed price. There has been some attempt to segregate users by selling cheaper packages with usage caps, but no sensible heavy users are on these packages.
While the ISPs must also buy Internet access, this is quite cheap compared to the backhaul costs. In fact the backhaul costs represent the largest portion of their operational costs.
Essentially the ISPs make money by overselling their backhaul and Internet access capacity. They get a fixed income from the user, and they pay part of this for access to the user and some overhead. The rest is used to pay for backhaul. What’s left is profit.
This is a great model when user’s don’t use the network for much. Backhaul is cheap and the ISPs reap in the money. It’s a terrible model when a significant number of your users use large volumes of bandwidth. The ISPs have a number of options to address this though:

• Charge the users more or move to variable pricing: They’ve ben reluctant to do this because end users migrate to the fixed price offerings. While the ISP may be succesful in charging more to high volume users, they simultaneously loose all the high margin low volume users. Building packages for low volumes users at a discount moves these guys from high margin to medium margin and the end users don’t move – they think they use quite a bit of bandwidth even though they don’t.
• Get the high volume users off the network: Also tough to do mostly because there are so many of them. The constant refrain has been “5% of the users use 80% of the bandwidth”. This is true but it’s never the same 5% – they cover 50% or more of their customer base here.
• Get the users to stop using so much bandwidth: They’ve been doing this. Traffic shaping has imposed effective bandwidth caps on certain applications, but there are technical way around this which are easy even for non-technical users. It’s a race and the ISPs are losing.
• Scare the users into stopping sharing big video files – hmm – sounds a lot like the recent announcement don’t you think?

I contend that the reason the ISPs are “working with the BPI to protect artists” is so that they have a weapon to remove heavy users from their networks. More importantly, this allows they to act in concert, against anti-competition law, to fix commercial policy. They can get rid of the heavy users if they all act together – that’s been illegal up to now but in guise of copyright protection they can do this and even act as if they’re sorry about it.
Too heavy handed? Let’s look at how they’ve reacted to a video download service which is legal – the BBC iPlayer. This allows people in the UK to download or stream, for free, BBC video content. It will not be covered by the new agreement since it’s perfectly legal. The ISPs have been going crazy over this ever since it was launched. The same arguments – it kills the service for other users, it’s consuming all our bandwidth, we get nothing for supporting the BBC – have been deployed.
The Alternatives prove my point
Now let’s look at the alternative proposal – that a surcharge is placed on Internet access to compensate artists for their losses. The BPI would love this – free money for something they can’t stop anyway. It’s the model that would have been imposed under government intervention. The ISPs would hate this.
In this instance the ISPs become responsible for collecting a fee and distributing it to the BPI. Their end users would call in droves, prices would appear to go up, and the IPS get nothing for this.
In return, end users would have free reign to download without fear. Backhaul prices would go through the roof and the ISPs would have no way to counter this.
Does it become obvious why they adopted the voluntary regime now?

Footnotes:

1. Much of this is from a UK point of view – I imagine by adjusting for local network conditions it could easily apply to other markets.
2. ISPs also make money selling services such as email or video – while these use backhaul bandwidth, there is enough predictability built in to allow them to price in this cost.

Disclaimer: I work for a business that sells backhaul in the UK. Clearly none of this is their opinion nor relates to their business in any way.

We’ve always known that people on the other end of an email address are not like people on the other end of the phone. Not from their point of view but from ours. Perfectly nice people will turn into crazy abusive monsters while emailing and say things they’d never dream of face to face.
So it is with the structure of relationships as well when mediated by electrons ( or indeed increasingly by photons ). We structure them differently and everything seems to me done at a speed you’d never consider with a real person.
I don’t know if it’s the response time – you’d never see a new friend 40 times a week or have that many phone calls but it’s pretty trivial to do that by mail and not notice. How can we help nut get entangled faster than before.
I’d never subscribe to the theis that they’re not more real then the relationships we build in real life. I’m sure people said that of talking on the phone, then of the mobile. Forget that -those friends exist in every sense that’s real. But the tools and structures we built to mediate the friction between people are creaking and in danger of being lost. They got in the way but they gave us something as well. Be nice if we could capture that value.

Have been messing about with the new software for my iPhone and one of the things you get is a wordpress application. So now I can compose rubbish to say while on the train instead of having to wait until I get home. Isn’t progress wonderful ?
On the iPhone software update. It’s not great. From a nice stable version four minor release the dot zero release is buggy and has numerous stalls. The app store is cute but I should have waited for the next version.

There’s a somewhat provocative article in a Boston paper. It’s focus is that though SSRI drugs like Prozac have very successfully treated depression, the way we thought they worked is completely wrong and is hiding a more fundamental understanding of the deep problem – depression, they claim, is a result of your brain cells shrinking and dying. Prozac and the other SSRIs don’t correct an imbalance – under this scenario they help heal physical problems with the brain.
It’s a somewhat scary prospect. It would mean millions of people have brains that are seriously damaged. On the face of it I can’t dismiss this kind of finding out of hand. It could all be completely wrong, but I can’t say that just yet.
I do have some questions though – manic depression seems to push against this theory – people here swing from depressed to high functioning – is this yet another symptom of brain damage or does it suggest that this is a different disease from classic depression?

Just a short observation – Amazon prime is the best investment I’ve made this year. I no longer think about ordering minor items from Amazon and they turn up quickly. I used to group all my deliveries into one big box every few months and then Amazon would take a month to collate all the orders and the package would never fit into my post box and I’d end up collecting it from the post office 2 days later. Now I get lovely little one book parcels. I pre-order books I want to read that are not yet published and by magic they appear on my doorstep months later!

I own a rather nice HP Photosmart 5180C that I got virtually for free from the Apple store. It’s a really nice printer though it seems to eat up ink at a rate of knots. However since I rarely print stuff, this is not a big deal.
In fact I print so infrequently that I only just got around to installing the printer drivers and then only to use the scanner. It comes with 3 CDs – 2 for Windows and 1 for Macintosh.
After some hassle with the driver CD and not having a CD-ROM in my Macbook Air, I get the install program running. HP has made it look mostly pretty but they’re still a Windows vendor and they do all the stupid crap that I hated about Windows.

1. The Installer has about 5 steps before you get to choose what kind of install you want – and there’s only one option – the default simple install which is 200Mb!
2. Once it gets going, the installer, without asking permission, adds various crap to my dock – I don’t want access to the goddamn photosmart app every second of my day – Windows start menus are useless due to this software arrogance that assumes you want their 18 applications in your face 24/7 – I’m just surprised they didn’t put shortcuts on my desktop.
3. I don’t know how they did it but the installer pulls focus from other windows, about once every 10 seconds. This is a horrible Windows trick – you’re working on one thing and suddenly some other window pops to the front. OSX has a very nice way of bouncing the dock icons to tell you an app needs your attention – simply switching away is evil and for an install app?? WTF.

There are some other annoyances – it tends to prefer HPs Photosmart application instead of iPhoto – when it copies photos it just dumps them in the Pictures folder etc. However I can live with these. There’s a bunch of really nice stuff about the printer and the 2 way communication between it and the computer makes for a really nice experience. But it would be really nice if HP engineers used a Macintosh for a few hours instead of just dumping the Windows experience on us when we explicitly opted out.

Update:
Well I spoke too soon as usual. The drivers were for OSX 10.4 and didn’t play well with my new 10.5 Macbook. After much struggling I found the updated drivers and am installing them now. The installer looks much better and so far isn’t pulling focus. It’s doubled in size though – 400Mb for a printer driver!