Where Do Some People Get Their Ideas?

In the NY Times today there was a piece by some English teacher at a local public college in Brooklyn. Now English and Brooklyn together should set the stage, no one ever thinks that English is used in that Borough, I should know, both my parents were born there, and to this day despite six languages and 26 countries of residence, I still say "huh" for her, but not "earl" for oil, nor "urnyun" for onion. And certainly not "udder" and "muddah" for other and mother, or "moyne" for mine.

So why am I surprised that this writer apparently admits to purloining someone's property and then is clueless as to what value it has.

The writer states:

Paying for Internet access, after all, isn’t like paying for cable TV, where cable providers pay cable networks in turn. My establishing a new network instead of sharing with neighbors does nothing to benefit the Web sites whose content benefits me and whose value to advertisers is based on views and visits. 

Nor is it like paying for phone service, where the physical object that makes and receives calls is inseparable from your unique number. My e-mail address is utterly portable: it’s not bound to an I.P. address or one computer — and, like the vast majority of the Internet’s services and information, it’s free

Let me try and explain. First nothing in life is free. Even I, from lowly Staten Island, home of the Jersey Shore family, albeit I left well before the bridge went up to Brooklyn, know that. Any user of the Internet is using something, they are getting bits and sending bits over someone's network, and that network is connected to someone else's. So who pays for that? Is it free?

Second, the cable company or the telco built out a network to someone's home and this network is delivering the Internet connection. That network costs money. Third, the network connects to a backbone, they charge a fee to carry your bits from and to some one at the distant end. Lots of costs add up. Thus the fee.

Let me add some specifics from reality:

1. The capital per subscriber can be roughly $2500 and we can assume a loaded monthly repayment of 1.5% which is $32.50 per month. Okay, okay, if you share that with cable TV perhaps we can cut it in half, but then again it may be as high at 2% so let's split the difference and say $25 per month.

2. The cost to connect to a backbone is $20 per Mbps per month. What that means is that if you had transmitted 1 Mbps continuously for a month. That further means that since there are 2,592,000 sec per month you can send 2.5 Tb per month on the system for $20.

3. But let us look at a download of a movie. That assumes an MPEG4 or H.264 download at 5 Mbps for say 2 hours, or a total of 36 B bits, or 1.5% of that $20 cost. That is $0.30 per movie. Just keep going and pretty soon you are costing quite a bit.

4. Thus using a few facts the costs, not prices for a friend in Brooklyn, are well into the $30+ per month. Now the CATV company charges $50 but that includes some other stuff like network management and repairs and billing and the like. Even profit.

5. Thus, you are purloining if you take what you have not paid for!

So let us return to the Times piece. Now let us read this teacher's logic. The very first sentence admits cable has to pay someone, well they still do dear teacher, they still do! As to the second sentence, what does this teacher think those wires are? Chopped liver? They are capital assets and they cost, yes dear teacher, they cost money. Oh and yes, there is a franchise fee and taxes and all that stuff which is going to pay your salary to teach, I believe writing.

Part of writing, unless it is all fiction, is dealing with facts. Perhaps learning about them first would be useful.