Time for a standard issue HN automobile analogy where for various engineering reasons commercial automobiles all have about the same order of magnitude of horsepower regardless of elderly demands that they just want to drive to church on Sunday and are not interested in racing thru national parks at 100 MPH like the TV commercials and young people supposedly demand.
In theory you'd think we could make motorized land vehicles with all random power outputs just like boats, but in practice they're all within an order of magnitude, how odd.
From an engineering standpoint I'm not sure what we could take away from a modern car to make a "Sunday church only" car that would still be street legal and not result in immense staggering levels of customer dissatisfaction. In addition, I'm kinda claiming old people saying all they want is email, are lying. The instant you sell that "email only" product the instant the phone lines light up with support calls. They don't actually want it, they want cheaper prices and they're hoping that stereotype will sell their request. They have no idea that "email only" would be costlier to provide, they just think its an inferior position so gimmie a lower bill. In summary, we can't sell it because it would be a support nightmare and its maybe not possible to engineer without significant extra expense.
The thing about market segmentation is that its very expensive to implement legacy long distance telco style era billing infrastructure... we aren't gonna split product prices from current price X into X/2, X/3, X/4 for inferior products. To fund the billing infrastructure we're going to split into 2(X+100), 0.75(X+100) etc. Both a VERY high offset to fund the billing costs, and an additional medical insurance style monopoly increase to multiples of higher price, not lower. Killing net neutrality is about monopoly middlemen raising prices, never about lowering them.
An even closer although more stretched analogy is a modern car that can drive across the country at high speeds is going to cost almost exactly as much as a car that can just barely drive to the post office. Its not like turn signals or air bags are any cheaper. Certainly there's no such thing as single mode fiber optic lasers that are only rated for email checking vs 10G multiplayer gaming use.
I've noticed watching my kids that bandwidth use has stopped increasing. Thru my life bandwidth use only increased, over many orders of magnitude. That era is over, and we're raising kids who have constant BW use over the course of their lives. For context my daughter is the same age as Youtube and nothing has happened since then WRT BW use. Everything other than streaming video is a rounding error and trillions of hours watched show resolution and quality are totally optional for video consumption despite decades of broadcast engineers and professional producers claiming the contrary in the legacy media.
You may or may not be surprised that many tools needed to provide an "email only" service already exist and are quite easy to implement.
Something as easy as allowing email + 3-4 links past email would solve virtually all problems and support calls and a bit of usage monitoring would eliminate the fraud
Tell me again how charging by amount of data use and speed is not already solving this problem? I can go to comcast.com and buy an email only package right now. Also, why is this suddenly going to allow you to take market share from Comcast? Do you honestly think the reason we don't have competition in the ISP space is due to not being able to unbundle packages?
In theory you'd think we could make motorized land vehicles with all random power outputs just like boats, but in practice they're all within an order of magnitude, how odd.
From an engineering standpoint I'm not sure what we could take away from a modern car to make a "Sunday church only" car that would still be street legal and not result in immense staggering levels of customer dissatisfaction. In addition, I'm kinda claiming old people saying all they want is email, are lying. The instant you sell that "email only" product the instant the phone lines light up with support calls. They don't actually want it, they want cheaper prices and they're hoping that stereotype will sell their request. They have no idea that "email only" would be costlier to provide, they just think its an inferior position so gimmie a lower bill. In summary, we can't sell it because it would be a support nightmare and its maybe not possible to engineer without significant extra expense.
The thing about market segmentation is that its very expensive to implement legacy long distance telco style era billing infrastructure... we aren't gonna split product prices from current price X into X/2, X/3, X/4 for inferior products. To fund the billing infrastructure we're going to split into 2(X+100), 0.75(X+100) etc. Both a VERY high offset to fund the billing costs, and an additional medical insurance style monopoly increase to multiples of higher price, not lower. Killing net neutrality is about monopoly middlemen raising prices, never about lowering them.
An even closer although more stretched analogy is a modern car that can drive across the country at high speeds is going to cost almost exactly as much as a car that can just barely drive to the post office. Its not like turn signals or air bags are any cheaper. Certainly there's no such thing as single mode fiber optic lasers that are only rated for email checking vs 10G multiplayer gaming use.
I've noticed watching my kids that bandwidth use has stopped increasing. Thru my life bandwidth use only increased, over many orders of magnitude. That era is over, and we're raising kids who have constant BW use over the course of their lives. For context my daughter is the same age as Youtube and nothing has happened since then WRT BW use. Everything other than streaming video is a rounding error and trillions of hours watched show resolution and quality are totally optional for video consumption despite decades of broadcast engineers and professional producers claiming the contrary in the legacy media.