Yeah, the sneakernet is alive and well - for those who have the sneakers, the minivans and the backups. Which does nothing for the other 95% of the population.

The Economist article on Internet TV says all the right things. But never underestimate the ability of the incumbent broadband ISPs in North America to leverage their near-monopoly control of last-mile facilities. In Canada, as well as the US, the incumbent telcos and cablecos have both the opportunity and motivation to use traffic-shaping, bandwidth caps and exhorbitant fees to discourage the use of the local loop for any service that threatens an established service of their own - especially video. Ever since the collapse of the content/carriage distinction, they've all been in a conflict of interest, fully sanctioned by the FCC and CRTC. You get to own the pipes plus you get to offer whatever content you like. So don't be holding your breath about the ability of that "torrent" of startups to dislodge the likes of Comcast and Rogers. True, Time Warner Cable just lost a high-profile battle on bandwidth caps. And they retaliated by taking their DOCSIS 3.0 marbles and going home to sulk. Up here, Bell Canada has filed a tariff that would allow it to extend 60-gig caps beyond its own subs, to be applied to every DSL reseller it supplies in Ontario and Quebec. And this tariff is actually being given serious consideration, even though it's egregiously anti-competitive. Proving once again that non-facilities-based competition just doesn't work. Did I mention Bell owns Canada's leading satellite-TV provider, ExpressVu? Sure, we're getting TV over the Web. And Canadians lead the world in consumption of online video. But fiber is the only viable way we'll ever get real hi-def TV running over the Web in North America, looking like it oughta. And the incumbents - with exceptions like FiOS - don't want to go near FTTH, because that would spell the end of the artificial bandwidth scarcity that keeps them in charge.

And that's why Bell's "response" is fronted by their head of regulatory affairs - whose role in life is to keep this entire discussion in so-called public hearings before a regulatory tribunal, the last place you'll ever find an actual member of the general public. Bell has survived for over a century in Canada by ensuring a) that nobody but economists, lawyers and policy wonks ever gets a word in edge-wise; and b) that even when ordered to play nice with new entrants (unbundling network for resale, etc), they will keep coming up with ingenious ways to drag their feet on progress. And they've succeeded brilliantly, partly because non-facilities-based competition doesn't work. But what the telcos, and cablecos, really don't want, in Canada or the US, is for the great unwashed public to discover... FTTH! And that all the copper plant they're squeezing the last dollar out of (for DSL and DOCSIS) is part of a holding pattern to keep typical residential bandwidth down in the 5 Mbps vicinity. In other words, a scarce resource. What's this horsemanure about "uncontended interntet" and freakin T1 lines? That's where the ILECs want the debate to stay. Meanwhile, anybody get a glimpse of the OECD Broadband Report released 2 weeks ago? The one that shows the US dropping - again - among the 30 member countries in BB rankings. And Canada coming up with one of the lowest FTTH scores on the planet. This debate's gotta move to a 3-to-5-year horizon - to a day when throttling is a non-issue, and the real issues resolve to whether residential pipes are still under the control of providers who lie through their teeth, never spend a dime on technical innovation and will fight to the death to own both the pipe and the content.