In order to stimulate lagging broadband growth in the UK, ISPs are signing up "content providers." Jeez:
"For us, the interesting thing is that everything in broadband has been focusing on speed," says Russell Craig, One.Tel spokesman, "but what we're trying to focus on is content as well. After you have gotten your emails faster, speed is sort of 'So what?', but if you can provide things like big music names, then that's going to drive broadband. MTV is the biggest name in music broadcasting so we really think this is a new stage of broadband."
What a load of tripe. You want to know why broadband isn't growing in the UK? How about the fact that getting a DSL line lit up takes three days of solid phone-calls, twenty hours of tech support, and requires you to familiarize yourself with ridiculous, unnecessary technologies like PPPoE and PPPoA (shudder) — technologies that even the tech-support people at the ISP are unlikely to understand (and that probably will require three firmware updates and $200 worth of long-distance tech-support calls before your router or wireless access-point will get online). Even then, it'll be six weeks before they get to it.
There's this pervasive myth that what broadband adoption really needs is to be attractive to a kind of slug-like couch potato who needs a compelling reason to spend this month's Twinkie-and-Budweiser budget on data services. A "consumer" that, in William Gibson's words is
"… best visualized a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
Half the geeks I know don't have broadband. These are the people who know exactly why a high-speed Internet connection is worth $50 a month but don't fancy half-a-season of "customer service" hell and inpenetrable "business-model" crapola before they get hooked up, not to mention the continuous threat of disconnection for engaging in forbidden activities like running a personal server or a P2P app.
(Thanks, Matt!)