Mark Cuban wrote a blog entry on the 15th that was picked up by internetnews.com's Roy Mark. I read the latter article first, and was quite put off by the way the proposal sounded.
This article makes it sound as if Cuban was proposing that all video content be a premium item on the internet–in fact, that anything taking a large amount of bandwidth would cost a premium.
By no means do I want to just write off the entire Roy Mark article, though. He has some valid arguments. It just seems he jumps to some conclusions that are not founded in the Cuban post, and fails to acknowledge that.
Mark makes it sound as if Cuban would have one users applications (all of them) communicate at a different speed from someone who is paying a premium. In fact Cuban is arguing that a specific type of application be accorded special expedience (i.e. bandwidth) over the internet.
Cuban used the illustration of a grandmother getting an exam of some sort over the internet and getting (paying for) a higher priority than the grandson who is uploading video of his latest prank. That is wonderful (though, I am not sure how probable the illustration is). It leads one to wonder, though, what it would take to pirate the higher bandwidth throughput; which is more likely to happen than not.
I don't completely agree with Cuban, either. His analogy of the HOV lane for the internet falls apart rather quickly for me. I have never had a problem getting to a site. I have had problems with a site loading. Most of these cases have to do with the amount of traffic at the server where the site is located–which would be a parking lot analogy, rather than a freeway analogy. The freeways are open and moving just fine. The focus needs to be more on the surface streets and parking lots of the internet.
The comments on the Cuban post are pretty insightful as well, the 14th one in particular.
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