[fmajid]

Content is not king, and Andrew Odlyzko explains why:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282

At the time he wrote it, the whole of Hollywood yearly revenue made less than 2 weeks of telcos’, and SMS by itself was worth more (SMS has been commoditized since, to the benefit of Apple and Facebook).

[rambojazz]

I wish I could read that paper, but it's behind a wall. Got a public link?

[fmajid]

Er, just click on the blue "Download PDF" button.

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=0051060861021170...

[rambojazz]

It doesn't work, nor does "Open PDF in Browser". It reloads the same page or it asks me to create a "SSRN Account".

[cbozeman]

Wow, thank you very much for the link. Now I see what's gone wrong with all the ISPs in America.

> “I don’t want to be anyone’s dumb pipes,” says Hindery. “If all you do is racks and servers, that’s dumb. What we’re doing is melding the network and the content.

This is a fancy way of saying, "I'm not content to just create a huge, high-speed network that services as many customers as possible, I want to extract yet more revenue out of a business I probably don't understand and can't be expected to competently manage."

Trying to explain to these idiots that the only thing an ISP - be it Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Spectrum, Frontier, whoever, can offer me, is a great big fat dumb fucking pipe, is like trying to explain the finer points of Shakespeare to a mollusk.