PENTACLE OF CONFLICT

Dick Pountain/16 December 2010 13:39/Idealog 197b

Last month I confessed that I've abandoned the Palm platform, after 14 years of devotion, for an Android phone and Google online storage of my personal information. One important side-effect of this move that's almost invisible to me, is a huge leap in my consumption of IP bandwidth. I use the phone at home, on Wi-Fi, as a constant reference source while I'm away from my PC reading books, and my time connected to BT Broadband must have at least doubled, though that doesn't cost me a penny more under a flat-rate tariff. And I'm far from alone in this altered consumption pattern: a report by network specialist Arieso recently analysed data consumption of latest generation smartphones and found their users staying connected for longer, and downloading twice as much data as earlier models.

Android users were hungriest, with iPhone4 and others close behind (and though they didn't even include iPad users, you just know those stay connected pretty well all the time). It's partly the nature of the content - faster CPUs make movie and TV viewing practical - and also that smarter devices soon lead you not even to know whether you're looking at local or networked content. The long-term implications for the net, both wired and 3G, are starting to become apparent, and they're rather alarming. It's not that we'll actually run out of bandwidth so much as the powerful political and industrial forces being stirred up to grouch about its unfair distribution.

The same week as that Arieso report, the Web '10 conference in Paris heard European telecom companies demanding a levy on vendors of bandwidth-guzzling hardware and services like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Apple. These firms currently make mega-profits without contributing anything to the massive infrastructure upgrades needed to support the demand they create. Content providers at the conference responded "sure, as soon as you telcos start sharing your subscription revenues with us". It's shaping up to be an historic conflict of interest between giant industries, on a par with cattle versus sheep farmers or the pro and anti-Corn Law lobbies.

But of course there are more parties involved than just telcos versus web vendors. Us users, for a start. Then there are the world's governments, and the content-providing media industries. In today's earnest debates about Whither The Webbed-Up Society, no two journalists seem to agree how many parties need to be considered, so I'll put in my own bid, which is five. My five players are Users, Web Vendors, Governments, ISPs and Telcos, each of whose interests conflict with every other, which connects them in a "pentacle of conflict" so complex it defies easy prediction. The distinction is basically this: users own or create content and consume bandwidth; web vendors own storage (think Amazon servers and warehouses, Google datacenters) and consume bandwidth; telcos own wired and wireless fabrics and bandwidth; and poor old ISPs are the middle-men, brokering deals between the other four. Note that I lump in content providers, even huge ones like Murdoch's News International, among users because they own no infrastructure and merely consume bandwidth. And they're already girded for war, for example in the various trademark law-suits against Google's AdWords.   

What will actually happen, as always in politics, depends on how these players team up against each other, and that's where it starts to look ominous. At exactly the same time as these arguments are surfacing, the Wikileaks affair has horrified all the world's governments and almost certainly tipped them over into seriously considering regulating the internet. Now it's one of the great cliches of net journalism that the 'net can't be regulated - it's self-organising, it re-routes around obstacles etcetera, etcetera - but the fact is that governments can do more or less anything, up to and including dropping a hydrogen bomb on you (except where the Rule of Law has failed, where they can do nothing). For example they can impose taxes that completely alter the viability of business models, or stringent licensing conditions, especially on vulnerable middle-men like ISPs.

Before Wikileaks the US government saw the free Web as one more choice fruit in its basket of "goodies of democracy", to be flaunted in the face of authoritarian regimes like China. After Wikileaks, my bet is that there are plenty of folk in the US government who'd like to find out more about how China keeps the lid on. The EU is more concerned about monopolistic business practices and has a track record of wielding swingeing fines and taxes to adjust business models to its own moral perspective. All these factors point towards rapidly increasing pressure for effective regulation of the net over the next few years, and an end to the favourable conditions we presently enjoy where you can get most content for free if you know where to look, and can get free or non-volume-related net access too. The coming trade war could very well see telcos side with governments (they were best buddies for almost a century) against users and web vendors, extracting more money from both through some sort of two-tier Web that offers lots of bandwidth to good payers but a mere trickle to free riders. And ISPs are likely to get it in the neck from both sides, God help 'em.