I'm not in Congress anymore.
AT&T has finally admitted that they know their 3G is bad by asking the FCC, “Can we ditch landline service?” Of course, this doesn’t mean that they are letting the public in on the idea that they are a data access provider. On the contrary, they will continue to operate under the idea that they are selling apples to people.
We’re so used to buying product that we tend to appreciate costs when they are presented to us in those terms. What I mean is, we’re used to buying apples, and if an item is presented to us as an apple, we’ll say, “How much is that apple?” Then the apple-seller says, “This apple costs this much.” And then we buy the apple.
But digital things aren’t really things, and they definitely aren’t apples.
When we see a digital object, whether it’s a movie, an article, a cartoon, if we see it on a screen, it’s presented to us in such a way that it looks like a physical object.
Like, to most of us, a DVD is this round disk you stick in a player with a movie on it. A book is this bound paper item with text in it. They are not the same thing. We pay different prices for them accordingly.
Did you ever see The Matrix? In the sturm und drang epic conclusion, Neo is able to see the world around him. It’s all constructed of bits of green computer code. The same is true for digital content. When we see it as an object, a DVD looks like an object, the same for a book as well. But when we’re watching that movie on a computer or reading that so-called ‘ebook’ on our screen, we’re seeing the computer’s representation of that object. Underneath, it’s all bits of green computer code.
Phone calls, broadband TV, text messages, ebooks … underneath it’s all just bits of green computer code. So, why do we pay different rates for the transmission of those bits? It’s because we all still tend to think of each digital item as a separate kind of object.
To put it another way, all of that digital stuff is made of the same thing. If digital objects were made of water (instead of green matrix letters), we would think it’s really weird to pay different rates for a glass of water over a pitcher of water at from the tap at home.
Anyway, we’ll see if this latest move will help AT&T in their quest to charge different rates for the same water in the pipe. Because after all the Internet is still just a series of tubes.