The Comcast Internet Cap Debate

Kevin Maney writes: The biggest debate in tech right now is whether or not Comcast is pure evil. The cable giant says that starting Oct. 1, it will cap its residential customers' Internet usage at 250 gigabytes of data.

On the surface, that seems kind of reasonable. The limit is about 100 times greater than the amount of data an average Comcast user downloads per month. You'd have to download four standard-def movies a day or 62,500 songs a month to reach 250 gigs. Comcast argues that in most cases, the limit will shut down pirates who illegally download gobs of movies and songs and slow the whole system for everyone else.

But the tech community is absolutely hammering Comcast over this. GigaOm declares it's the "end of the Internet as we know it" -- well, for Comcast's customers, at least. (For Verizon and its FiOS high-speed Internet offering, Comcast's decision must look like manna from heaven -- a strategic hole in Comcast's business the size of a small planet.) ZDNet similarly argues that bandwidth caps will kill innovation on the Web -- since a lot of innovation is about taking advantage of broadband speeds and high-capacity hard drives. The Slashdot crowd is typically apoplectic about anything that smacks of repression of their Internet freedoms.

To be honest, Comcast's decision seems to me to be about television, not the Internet. Comcast's business is still centered on providing cable TV at $100, $150 a month. Internet video is starting to challenge traditional television, whether its reruns on Hulu or live convention coverage on MSNBC.com. Comcast wants to sell movies on demand over its cable system, but Netflix, Amazon and others are selling movies over the Web for less. And vidoe and movies, of course, are the largest bandwidth hogs on the Net.

So Comcast -- like Cox and other cable companies -- is in the position of providing a service that enables one of the biggest threats to its core business. That's one heck of an internal conflict. For now, the decision seems to be in favor of protecting the TV side of the business.