I had first skipped over Mark Cuban’s newest post today when I saw it listed on TechMeme and the headline struck me as nothing than link bait and just a rehash of all the other hype about the demise of the Internet. Then I noticed Dan Dodge’s take on the post so turned around and went back to the source.

As Dan pointed out Mark’s headline was just a bit misleading because the main part of his point was that the Internet has now become a utility - something that we have come to expect as a normal part of our daily lives. What he was trying to point out; and which Dan agreed with him on is it isn’t that the Internet is dead but more that it is become a stagnant playground where the new and the exciting come to play.

Mark feels that this is directly attributed to the lack of real growth in the adoption and availability of broadband. While many of us might feel that our current meg per second rates are enough; which by the way I don’t, both Mark and Dan believe that until broadband to the home even closely resembles what is available on the backbone true innovation and exciting new uses won’t happen.

I agree with both of them and while neither of them come out and say why North American broadband lags behind even countries in the Far East or Europe I will because it is simple.

Corporate greed … and yes it is as simple as that.

Telecom and cable companies have no interest in providing faster services; because while it may be better for the users and spur incredible innovations they are quite happy playing games of semantics making the users believe they are getting the best speeds available.

After all why go to all the trouble of improving the service when people are happy to pay out what they already are for a mediocre service. Why deal with the added expenses when they don’t have to and as it is they are adding billions of dollars to their profits - so what is providing better service going to do to benefit them.

They would rather threaten Google and others with traffic shaping and spend millions on fighting against network neutrality because that will return them a better profit margin than providing their customers with better and faster service.

So yes the Internet is stagnating .. it’s stopped moving forward in the true sense of the word; regardless of what the Web 2.0 crowd would have us believe, and it all boils down to easy money for the least amount of service.

Conversation Tags: internet, telecom, greed, Mark Cuban, Dan Dodge