depth first search

I have a bit of a soft spot for the “Keep Austin Weird” campaign. What can I say? I’m a sucker for loose and mysterious confederations of local people campaigning under a banner of weirdness.

But that sort of begs the question: who’s turning Austin normal?

I came across one answer as I was reading up on the latest counter-proposal for the Cactus Cafe closure over at Student Friends of the Cactus Cafe. That in turn led to a series of Chronicle articles detailing the brutal budget slash and burn that the Union has faced under the direction of Andy Smith.

I guess Andy gets to retire after he’s eliminated everything unique about the Texas Union. Maybe when the Starbucks gets to expand into the gutted corpse of the Catcus Cafe, Andy will get free mocha lattes for life. But first Kinko’s has to take over for the UT print center, and we definitely need some kind of satellite Border’s bookstore.

Only then, Andy, will you have a career you’ll be proud to look back on.

Some more on metered broadband coming to Austin:

It was no accident that Time Warner Cable included Austin in its plans to roll out tiered pricing plans for Internet access. In fact, the city’s concentration of tech-savvy customers is the very thing that attracted the company’s efforts.

And some worrying usage cases being considered:

Austin American Statesman said today that a family that streams 7.25 hours of video (that’s 3 movies folks) will see an increase in their bill of upwards of $200. This is not an issue of keeping up with technology.

My primary concern is that without any competition, TWC will have no incentive to offer more capacity at lower prices and that capacity pricing will simply result in higher charges for the same service. I also don’t particularly buy into the notion that “high usage” customers are using up all the capacity. Without context, this kind of distinction coming from TWC could mean anything. In particular, maybe the high-versus-low usage distinction divides customers by who watches videos online and who doesn’t. If this is true, then TWC changing their pricing scheme is entirely anti-competitive, since the cable provider is trying to shift people who watch online videos to the DVR+Cable revenue stream and away from competing sources of video content.

Without competition, there is no alternative.

Of secondary concern is that the whole notion of capacity versus bandwidth pricing may not really align with how capacity and bandwidth are allotted on the actual network. If you are going to create a finer set of pricing distinctions, and force customers to estimate their future behavior and needs when making broadband purchasing decisions, those fine distinctions should allow for better network performance for everyone, by aligning customer usage with network constraints. But if the pricing distinctions are not really closely coupled with any network constraints, then why should we expect better service for the increased cost and hassle?

Web users, the meter is running. In a strategy that’s likely to rankle consumers but be copied by competitors, Time Warner Cable (TWC) is pressing ahead with a plan to charge Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume. Starting next month, the company will introduce tiered pricing in several markets.

I’m not sure this is going to go over well in Austin, TX. In fact, I can imagine all kinds of nefarious consequences. Do you really want to waste 40mb updating Windows every week? Do you get billed for visiting Time Warner’s website? What if a neighbor steals your bandwidth? What if a virus steals your bandwidth? In fact, why should we believe TWC usage statistics at all? Are they a regulated utility now? Some guy working at TWC could up everyone’s bill by 5% using a single database update.