slow motion.

a moment of clarity.


words. 

"...Electricity wholesalers such as Enron are akin to Internet service providers such as Time Warner and Comcast in important ways. The electricity wholesalers had incentives to starve the energy market in order to extract greater fees from utilities and consumers. ISPs have similar incentives to manipulate their bandwidth in order to extract fees from websites (such as Netflix and YouTube), as well as not build out any infrastructure that would make bandwidth cheaper or make your Internet faster.

 ...Many customers are already living with a virtual Internet brownout. Tier 1 Internet provider Level 3, which provides top-level “backbone” services that reach the entire world, has posted several scary updates on the state of affairs. General counsel Michael Mooney observes that the ISPs are playing a game of chicken by demanding content providers pay them before they build out any further infrastructure. “These ISPs break the Internet by refusing to increase the size of their networks unless their tolls are paid,” Mooney said. Worse, they don’t even use the capacity they have, artificially starving their customers and slowing down the Internet. (Which explains why Game of Thrones is always buffering on your HBO Go, for example.) Level 3 Vice President Mark Taylor provided evidence that five U.S. ISPs (and one European ISP) are refusing to upgrade their infrastructure despite their connection ports being saturated. In other words, these ISPs are intentionally letting their service degrade because they’re cheap, like a city not fixing potholes in its roads..."

SLATE: Yes, Your Internet Is Getting Slower