Primitive Internet killing new niches

Consumer software as a service (SaaS) is considered such a promising niche that both Microsoft and Google are targeting it.

My lovely bride of many years had a spreadsheet she needed to work on for church, her own laptop was in the shop, so I said (quite magnanimously I thought) why not give it a try? "Don't say I never gave you anything," I added, before ducking at the pillow thrown toward my head.

Anyway, she spent some time with it, and I asked how it went. "It's slow," she said. After a relatively short time, after just a few dozen cells had been filled with typed-in data, it was taking minutes for each new entry to load.

The reason for that is our primitive Internet service. We use cable Internet and the available speeds haven't increased in this decade. The same thing is true for telephone broadband.

This is silly. With VOIP there is no reason for phone networks to isolate most of their bandwidth for voice. With just a little more two-way bandwidth there would be no need for a "cable television" service either -- we could watch whatever we wanted, whenever, in full HD.

The bits are being hoarded. The phone company and the cable company know they can get more money, and exercise more control over both buyers and sellers, by defining the vast majority of their digital bandwidth as "services," while still getting $50/month for the slow Internet speeds they do offer.

The "triple play," in other words, is a fraud.

This is a business decision with major implications for the industry. The refusal of suppliers to sell more Internet bandwidth means that exciting new services using that bandwidth -- like consumer SaaS -- can't get off the ground.

Continuing this policy, now, is a political choice, a choice our political leaders make for us every day. We paid to build those phone and cable lines, under strict government regulation. Now the regulation is gone and we're supposed to say, that's their property, to do with as they wish?

I don't think so.

This policy is going to bite harder as time goes by. We've already lost the mobile application space to foreigners, thanks to hoarding and greed. Do we have to lose the Internet application space as well?