A new dawn for ISPs and Content Providers ...

In recent years, more precisely this past year we have witnessed the massive growth of streaming services for entertainment.

There big “old” global streaming players like YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, among others, added to local or semi-local players like Google TV, Hulu, Fox, ESPN, TIDAL, are increasing their competition with the new services of Apple and Disney among others. But let's not limit ourselves to streaming content but let's put online or partially online gaming services in the arena like those recently announced by Apple and Google.

The problem, I think, is that the way in which the current business model is raised is not scalable and is doomed to failure.

All this poses new technical and business challenges, some of which I briefly and informally analyze below:

The problem of the geographical limitations of the contents

At this point there are incompatibilities and limitations imposed on these businesses that I believe respond to obsolete models inherited from a past in which things were done in a way that today greatly limits the full development and potential of these services.

One of these limitations is the regionalization of content for streaming rights reasons. In the past, the business or a large part of it resided in the sale of rights to broadcast content in different regions or countries. Today these companies that produced and sold emission rights or that were simply intermediaries, face the new modalities of contracting services by customers, where streaming and direct contracting seem to be the big stars. But let's not forget the global nature of the Internet and the fact that the Internet does not recognize geographical boundaries. Then, when a new streaming service is announced anywhere in the world, thousands or millions of potential customers automatically begin to investigate the contracting and visualization mechanisms. It is at that point where the vast majority of them clash head-on with the issue of rights and geographical virtual barriers that for some reason content providers insist on imposing.

I think the world has changed ... and who does not see it or delay seeing it will lose (sooner or later) the race.

The era of geographic content limitation has come to an end. The most skilled and willing to invest extra dollars hire VPN services to access geographically limited content. Those not so knowledgeable or willing regret not being able to access those contents and are at a disadvantage.

Then, whoever goes first in braking down these barriers and universalizing the possibilities of access to services, will clearly be the most prolific. For this, I think that it is necessary that those who are responsible for planning in the content providers change the way of thinking and doing these businesses ... and the new players who in turn own all their content (like Disney for example) are the ones who have all the advantages to quickly make this move and position themselves ahead.

The problem of the granularity of services

A new inconvenience arises for consumers: that of the granularity or disaggregation of services. There is so much offer of services today, that in order to have a wide range of them it is necessary for a family to invest several tens or hundreds of dollars monthly in content. I believe that this reality undermines the future development of these modalities of services and places a clear limitation on their growth.

In the past, cable or broadcasting companies in general were the ones who performed that integration; they were the ones who “packaged” the proposals and marketed them as such.

So, I think it opens a new path towards business models that integrate the proposals, as well as new business models for Internet Access Providers (ISPs as they are called).
Why the ISPs?

It is at this point where the commercial and the technical come together. It happens that these new streaming services require that the broadcast occurs as close as possible to the client, because that way the quality and speed are maximized while reducing latency, without having to greatly impact the costs of bandwidth and Internet streaming (both for content providers, ISPs, or end users).

For this, agreements between content providers and ISPs are required, where providers host their content in ISP Data Centers to position it (in terms of networks and the Internet) very close to the client.

However, these agreements, I believe, also open the possibility of other agreements through which ISPs can play the role of natural integrators of content.
How?

I believe that the synergy between content providers and ISPs is natural, necessary and potentially very productive for both.

In this way the suppliers can host their content in the ISPs and the latter play the role of offer integrators vis-à-vis consumers, maximizing business possibilities and providing an economically attractive and profitable offer for consumers.

All this requires, again, a paradigm shift in the way of doing these businesses and in the way of relationship between Content Providers and Infrastructure Providers (ISPs, Telcos, etc).

For this to happen, it is necessary the will of all parties and people with sufficient mental openness and future vision of the telecommunications and content business as a win-win for all parties, rather than a race where everyone runs towards a point in the infinite that is unattainable and where otherwise, the most harmed will be all, especially consumers.



I think it is a conclusion of the set behavior theory, mathematically demonstrable, that says something like that the maximum benefit of the set is not the sum of the maximization of the benefit of each individual. This means that everyone has to be willing to give something up, so that the benefit of the set is maximum! And this, in the history of business, has always been a huge challenge that only a few visionaries have understood !!!

Are we safe?

I think it is necessary to define correctly what we, the vast majority of people, understand in regard "to feel safe" and that we understand or intend to in regard "to be safe".
To begin, it is not the same to feel safe than to be safe. Usually the first is a very plausible state of being reached, while the second is, depending on the level of depth, practically a utopia.

On the first: "to feel safe"

Most people normally experience an acceptable degree of security on a day-to-day basis. Both physically, which is the most notorious and worrying when it is in danger, as well as in finer aspects that can range from the security of our interactions or communications in a broad sense, as well as to that of our information, the one that identifies us or the one that it does not identify us directly but that it belongs to us because we have generated it and that of course, in general it can be used for, ultimately and after more or less complex processing, identify us.

The problem that arises with the advancement, deployment and massive use of ICTs is that the vectors of exposure to potential vulnerabilities in security are increasing explosively and became practically impossible to control for most of us.

So, while in the past technology was part of our lives, today our lives go through technology and more creepy, it depends on it in many ways. That change that looks like a mere pun, is far from it. It is the indication of an irreversible modification in the ways in which society communicates, in the way we interact and in the way we perceive security and safe.

In the past, there was a maxim that said that "security is the enemy of comfort" and speaks of the fact that as the security levels of any system increase, comfort or simplicity in the use of that system decreases potentially and effectively.

Why do I say this is a thing of the past? Because although it still has some validity today, the question to ask ourselves is whether, really, with the “old” approach to security or safe we are really making the systems safer, or if simply what we are doing is complicating even more its "usability" without increasing its security effectively or significantly. On the other hand, it is possible to design systems so that their use become simple and at the same time maintain a reasonable and acceptable degree of safety and security.

We must then, I believe, develop new models of safe use and security of systems that are intrinsically and inseparably linked to our lives. Many of them used daily by all of us without even stopping a minute to think or realise that they represent, to a greater or lesser extent, risks to our privacy or security. This inevitably leads us to the development of the second point: "to be sure".

I also think that while it is true that privacy and security are two different things, in the vast majority of cases and for the vast majority of people, the lack of the former implies deficiencies in the latter.

On the second: "be safe"

To be safe often represents a difficult quest and at this point I will say that even a utopia. The good news, I think, is that while we cannot reach a pure state of safeness or security, we can approach it as much as we want. Of course, the closer we want to be, the more investment it will require in terms of training, awareness, development of procedures and protocols as well as in economic terms. I highlight the concept of investment and the importance of the first two mentioned, because that is where all this becomes more effective and sustainable in the medium and long term.

• The first thing is to admit it ... we are living in times when we must admit a high degree of coexistence with systems that are part of our lives today and that make us potentially more unsafe than when we did not use them. But at the same time we can no longer stop using them.
• To Design the systems to be safe from scratch (what I call the NO-by-default principle and the need of not requiring more than that strictly necessary for the purpose of the system).
• The issue that we historically identify vulnerabilities in the software but not in the hardware and the enormous differences and difficulties in detecting and identifying potential vulnerabilities in the latter compared to the former.

 

 

So who's bad in this movie and what happens to those who are "extras"?

"In the past they were some and today they are others" ... the question is how, being a third party, to be reasonably safe? Being a third party, which also neither designs nor produces the equipment and/or the software that runs on said equipment, it is practically impossible to have all the necessary control over the entire production chain so that we can be completely sure of what happens with all the data and information these systems collect and handle. Then, one way of approaching the desired safeness state is to implement mechanisms that takes action after the mentioned production chain.

As a first approach, it would be possible to analyze the possibilities and resources to carry out testing and homologation of the various devices we use. The main and big problem that this presents is that the number of devices that we use every day, and not to mention the total number of devices that are sold, is in practical terms and on a user scale, simply infinite. That is to say, it would not be sensible to even think about the possibility of approving them all or of having a quality control system in charge of an entity that should review each device sold in a certain market.

What to do, then? One possible course of action could come from the side of the self-classification of the devices. That is, by classifying them within some internationally pre-accredited scale and serving as a guide for users when acquiring a certain device. This is not a simple issue either, because in the first place, we would have to agree at some international organization level, of what that scale would be and what elements should be present for a device to fall within a certain level of classification. Secondly, this scale should then be respected by the manufacturers so that the self-classification serves effectively.

Another important step comes from the hand of education and awareness. This seems undoubtedly to be a path that is both effective and necessary for each user to have at least the basics to classify a particular device and decide whether or not it is in accordance with the satisfactory level of security sought. For this, education and awareness must be carried on at all levels, both educational (all education stages) and public campaigns.

As a higher level step, it can be available, at domestic, business or industrial level, equipment with at least basic and open hardware and software capabilities. If not, we are only transferring the problem to the end user. And that said equipment would be responsible for informing us of the origin and destination of any inbound or outbound data flow and that it should be available for us the means to configure and train the systems ourselves, through simple and clear rules so as to identify and differentiate “suspicious” flows from “normal” flows or at least so that it warns us when something goes out of the expected or specified behavior. This that can be read as complicated, is relatively simple 'cos some of these "firewall like" systems are currently commercially available and accessible to many users both domestically and corporately or organizationally.

The field that I believe has still much room to improve is the graphical interface, configuration mechanisms and capacity building and awareness, so that safe and security mechanisms and devices become really functional and accessible to us all. And of course regulation and public policy, when needed, must encompass all this procedures.

Neutral o no neutral ... ¿esa es la cuestión?

Esto es algo que escribí allá por el 2018... lo dejo por acá por si quieren leerlo

La historia ha demostrado, para bien o mal, que esto de la neutralidad tienen tantas puntas como opiniones y que lo que fue bueno ayer no lo es hoy y lo que se creía maduro no estaba para nada maduro... prueba de ello es que -el país que inventó lo de neutralidad de red- fue el que dio recientemente de baja, o prácticamente de baja su normativa al respecto. Puede que esto sea errado... o puede que no.

Yo creo que hay que ver el tema como un todo (el bosque y no los árboles).

Mi opinión personal sobre si el "ofrecer servicios a algunos y no a otros" como una de las posibles definiciones de no neutralidad, creo que está mal. Creo que desde ese punto de vista, si existe una normativa al respecto, lo que debe establecer es la no discriminación de unos frente a otros. Pero otro tema es que existan diferentes planes para algunos que requieren características de tráfico que otros no requieren.

Si nos ponemos un poco formales, esto de perfiles de trafico (algo que puede ser tildado de no neutral) siempre fue así en el pasado. Sobre todo cuando las redes de acceso eran -lentas-. Claro, hoy como en nuestra realidad de Uruguay tenemos un ancho de banda "de la masita" (en promedio y no en promedio porque hasta un Universal Hogares anda volando y es gratis) damos por asegurada cierta velocidad y pedimos más y más sobre esa base... pero hagamos memoria de cuando esa velocidad de la que hoy gozamos era una mera ilusión, un sueño. Hagamos memoria de cuando luego de 4 horas de usar el -teléfono- para baja un jueguito discando 09091234 o 11133 alguien de nuestra casa -levantaba el tubo- y nos queríamos matar porque había que arrancar todo de cero...

Mi versión de la historia para quién desee leerla

Mi opinión al respecto de la mayoría de las definiciones de neutralidad de red es bastante disrruptiva. Yo creo que la neutralidad nunca tuvo que ver con el usuario final sino que siempre fue un problema entre operadores de transporte (o acceso a Internet) y proveedores de contenido... una batalla (o guerra) que entablaron unos con otros producto del avance en la conquista que realizaron los unos sobre los otros y producto de la creciente demanda de infraestructura (impulsada por las aplicaciones de video principalmente) y producto también de que las ganancias se comenzaron a mover del tránsito o acceso al consumo de contenidos.

Entonces, creo yo, llego el punto en que algunos proveedores de contenidos hicieron una de las jugadas marketineras más grandes de la historia de Internet (esto es mi -teatralización- de los hechos claro está) que fue convencer a los -usuarios- y algunas organizaciones sin fines de lucro de pelear una guerra que no era de ellos a la que llamaron -neutralidad de red-... y lo lograron.

Lo lograron en parte porque también los ISP o proveedores de tránsito o acceso, en lugar de buscar acuerdos con los proveedores de contenidos para crear situaciones de Win-Win, pretendieron cobrarle a los usuarios (como lo hacen desde el principio de la historia de Internet) y también cobrarle a los proveedores de contenido en el entendido de que ellos también son usuarios.

Y yo concuerdo con que ellos también son usuarios... pero el problema en ese punto se reduce a quién -es más grande- y en este caso, los peces gordos en el mundo de Internet ya hacía tiempo que eran los proveedores de contenidos. Un mundo en el que los ISP comenzaban a perder mercado pues entre otras cosas nadie ya prácticamente llamaba por teléfono, nadie mandaba SMSs y el mero acceso a Internet comenzaba más y más a ser un commodity con cada vez menos margen de ganancia si no se le agrega valor.

En otras palabras el dinero que antes estaba en la cantidad de bytes que pasaban por el cable, ahora está en los contenidos.

Y ¿cómo termina esto? Yo que se... siempre creí y lo sigo haciendo, que la solución va por la vía de los acuerdos entre unos y otros proveedores (acceso por un lado y contenidos por otro) y en buscar relaciones de negocio en la que unos brinden servicios a otros y todos brinden servicios a los usuarios finales de forma que todos puedan subsistir y continuar en cada uno en su parte del negocio. Tampoco creo en la -acaparación- del negocio por completo por los -monstruos- de Internet, pues ello indefectiblemente a la larga termina mal para todos (la historia también lo ha demostrado una y otra vez). Por desgracia la codicia del ser humano no conoce límites.

Entonces ¿creo en la neutralidad de red? Bueno, primero tendríamos que definir que es exactamente y luego vemos...

Creo si, en la igualdad de ofertas y no discriminación, para todos.

No creo en que los operadores de redes no puedan manejar la forma en que los datos fluyen en sus redes, porque pretender eso es simplemente una utopía.

No creo en que los únicos que no son neutrales sean los operadores de transporte porque quienes manejan los contenidos ponen -donde quieren- el contenido que quieren... y nadie habla de neutralidad en ese sentido. Nadie habla del por que puedo ver una película en Uruguay que no puedo ver en Brasil o en USA o donde quiera si estoy pagando por ello. Nadie habla de que pago un servicio -global- que no es igualitario en todo el mundo y que depende desde qué sitio estoy accediendo. Nadie habla de por qué si consumo un servicio en Uruguay pago impuestos en California o de por qué los derechos para visualizar contenidos no son algo global a esta altura de la historia y van variando dependiendo de dónde me encuentro... y suma y sigue.

Creo que es un tema muy amplio, con muchas aristas y del que recién estamos empezando a ver las bondades y las cosas no tan buenas... y del que aún hay mucho que debatir (en el mejor sentido de la palabra) para buscar las mejores soluciones a estos nuevos problemas que surgen.

Lo peor que podemos hacer es aplicar soluciones viejas a problemas nuevos solo porque somos lo suficientemente vagos como para ponerle -pienso- a estas cuestiones.

Y lo otro peor que podemos hacer es creer tener una solución y buscar problemas a los cuales aplicarle la misma.