StickWithANose

Like financial innovation the idea of ISP innovation is ultimately destructive. Wired

There’s a complicated fight in D.C. right now over how the FCC classifies broadband services, so it can regain the power to impose some basic rules on the industry.

Free-market groups and the industry are banging the table, arguing against the consequences — saying that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet and will kill innovation.

Here’s the simple truth: You don’t want your ISP to innovate.

At least not in the way, they want to “innovate.” [...]

In the last couple of years, ISPs “innovated” by changing how they handle users who type in a URL that doesn’t exist. Under net protocols, the ISP’s DNS servers are supposed to report an error code to your browser in those circumstances. Instead, ISPs are now serving up pages with ads, sometimes in ways that introduce huge security risks…

ISPs also recently dipped their toes into another innovation: Selling access to everything their customers do online in order to build profiles on them and secretly insert targeted ads into other company’s web pages…

What we want and need is fast, reliable and affordable internet access.

The dirty secret of ISPs is that even as broadband usage on their networks continues to increase 30 to 40 percent a year, their annual costs for shipping data onto and off the net’s main pipes continues to fall.

The problem isn’t the cost of shipping data.

The problem is that the large ISPs answer to Wall Street and instead of planning and investing for abundance, they prefer to spend their time thinking of ways to extract more money from customers without having to invest significantly in future-proof infrastructure.