StoptheCap! must organize a Truth Squad of volunteers willing to confront sloppy journalism, lazy reporters, and Kool-Aid drinking consumers hoodwinked into actually believing that metered pricing is about saving them money instead of fattening broadband provider profits.

Your job: To find press accounts that might as well have been rewritten industry press releases, those that adopt the premise that the provider is pushing, and exposing industry talking points that go unchallenged in the media.  Then the call to action goes out to bombard the reporter with protest e-mail, confront the bias in the reporting in letters to the editor, and pro-consumer pushback in comment sections where the public can learn some facts for a change.

The Kansas City Star utterly failed in its report on Saturday, lapping up industry talking points and presenting them in a myopic view of the future of broadband.  Reporter Scott Canon quoted opposition from one public statement on the Free Press website, one sentence from a group called Knowledge Ecology International, and a sentence from a press release from Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY).  After that, he paddled around the pool with one industry talking point after another.

Experts say that changes in the way people use the Internet — and the way some gorge on its endless cache of data — mean current pricing systems could go the way of your dial-up modem.

A metered pricing system has been in effect in Lawrence for four years. While Sunflower Broadband has heard some complaints, for most Web surfers it has kept monthly charges flat. Some users have seen steep cuts in their bills, while relatively few have had to pony up extra bucks to devour gigabytes.

In the end, said the CEO of the Internet service provider in Lawrence, “it’s a matter of fairness.”

Fairness is a foreign concept in this piece.  What Canon couldn’t be bothered to point out was the CEO of Sunflower Broadband also happens to be the president of the American Cable Association, an industry trade organization and lobbying group with a vested interest in this subject.  What he also omits is that Sunflower Broadband is an actual example of what happens when a community ends up in a broadband backwater, where competition does not provoke a better level of service.  Lawrence residents have not been thrilled with the competition in their community, pointing out DSL is not an option for many people who live too far away from the central office.  Service and restrictions have been so bad, a non-profit organization, the Lawrence Freenet, was established to try and provide wi-fi broadband at more reasonable pricing to city residents with limited success.

The take away message from Lawrence is that the competitive situation on the ground isn’t about fairness.  It’s about delivering maximum profits to the only viable provider many residents have, and charging outrageous prices for those unwilling to accept a tightly rationed Internet.  Overlimit fees start at $1/GB if you plan on going over in advance (who does?).

So four years ago he imposed new rules for what now governs about 25,000 customers in and around Lawrence. Instead of the old flat rate of about $30 a month, customers had a choice.

They could stick with existing rates if they held their activity to about 10 gigabytes a month. That’s plenty of data to cater to routine Internet use and downloading a few full-length movies a month.

Or they could pay less, about $18 a month, and skip the movies but expect a quick connection for anything else they wanted. Finally, if they wanted to download movies by the dozens, they could pay about $50 for what Knorr called “probably the fastest in the country for the price.”

The only choice customers had was accepting they had no choice.  Limiting usage of the Internet, which even Time Warner Cable claims is growing among average subscribers by 40% a year, is a losing proposition for consumers and their wallets.  It assures the Internet in Lawrence, Kansas remains the domain for e-mail warriors and web page readers.  Those “few full length movies” better be ultra low resolution if Canon’s reporting is to be believed.  Just two from Netflix will leave you less than two gigabytes for everything else you do that month.  Does the Kansas City Star bother to ask any residents of Lawrence if they’re happy with an Internet stuck in time unless they want to pony up more dollars for a few more gigabytes to their ration?  Of course not.  Why be bothered when there are more quotes to be had from company officials and other interested parties!

“Probably the fastest in the country for the price.”  Now most reporters worth a dime will seize on the word “probably” and note that is a classic weasel word.  They might want to do their job and check it out.  Since more and more, we are the media on this issue, I figured I’d take, oh, about 45 seconds and do just that. Cablevision’s Optimum Online Boost offers 30Mbps service for around that price when taking a bundled service package.  Even broken out, their service is much faster and there are no download limits, like Sunflower’s 50GB a month.  And if you don’t want to pay that much, you can have a slower speed tier at similar prices with no overlimit fees at all.

As readers here have commented repeatedly, faster speeds don’t mean much when you are stuck with a paltry download cap, with $2/GB overlimit fees.

“You can raise prices to all consumers to reflect the increase in bandwidth, or you can target a relatively small number of users, less than 5 percent, who use the majority of bandwidth,” said Craig Moffett of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

The problem, Moffett said, “is that you’ve got a user community that has been trained to expect unlimited usage.”

No, actually the problem is that consumers have gotten educated, informed, and active in recognizing an unjustified Money Party when they see one.  The Kansas City Star reporter guy can’t figure out Craig Moffett also has a vested interest in this issue, having been a long time Wall Street proponent of cable stocks and pooh-pooher of the competition.  Moffett is so involved in this industry, he testified against net neutrality in a Senate hearing in 2006, saying cable would take investments in their systems out of the sandbox and go home if they were stuck with having to live with a level broadband playing field.

Do you think the residents and readers of the Star would want to know these pertinent facts about Mr. Moffett?

For starters, we download far more today than ever before. Search gurus at Google recently estimated that traffic generated by YouTube alone exceeded all Internet activity in 2000.

“The Internet Grew Since 2000 — Film at 11.”  Wow, there’s a surprise.  The Internet is growing.  Apparently the exaflood folks didn’t get a chance to get their two cents in Canon’s piece before it was printed.  Of course, Google’s technology guru Vint Cerf has reflected on the issue of broadband growth repeatedly as part of the Google Public Policy Blog, and he is opposed to consumption based billing, another fact the Star‘s intrepid reporter completely missed.

Gradually it seemed to many consumers as if the Internet was slowing down. In truth, it just got busier.

How did this claim out of nowhere get past editors over there?  Who are these “many consumers?”  Is there perhaps a different explanation for broadband slowdowns, such as a company making enormous profits on their broadband products while at the same time reducing their investment in those networks?  That’s just one.  Equipment failure, a bad coaxial cable, a poorer performing provider of wholesale bandwidth for backbone access, or any number of other reasons can explain this “out of thin air” claim, before allowing your report to be used as a justification for enormous rate hikes and rationing plans.

“Even with bigger pipes, if everybody in an apartment building showered at the same time, you’d have unhappy people,” said Richard Doherty, the research director for Envisioneering Group, a technology consulting firm. “It’s the same thing if a lot of people are downloading movies.”

Yes, which is why cable companies are being asked to spend a portion of their fat profits to implement DOCSIS 3.0, a win-win upgrade for consumers and cable operators themselves, which permits a pipe that can change size as needed to accommodate traffic.  Is this is a justification for where Canon’s piece seems headed?  Watch in amazement as the man Canon quotes debunks the reporter’s premise in an article for another newspaper:

These plans to charge for above-average Internet use “are unjustifiable for almost everywhere in the country except for rural America,” Richard F. Doherty, the research director of the Envisioneering Group, a consulting firm that studies cable technology.

That is from the New York Times just over 10 days ago.

The only thing useful out of this entire endeavor is this warning which we’ll be sure to put away in our pocket for use once Time Warner’s Re-Education campaign leads to a return of the Cap ‘n Tier nonsense:

Common factors showed why some rates were so high: Viruses had made “bots” of their computers, relaying spam on someone else’s behalf; someone in the house, most often a teenager, was swapping large numbers of movies; or neighbors had tapped into a wireless router and were piggybacking on the user’s service.

“It’s sort of like the neighbor was watering his lawn and running his fountain using your connection,” Knorr said. “Your water pressure drops, and you’re paying his bill.”

Actually, it’s more like a bonanza of cash for the cable broadband provider who really doesn’t care how the person racked up the usage, as long as they get the check to pay for it at the end of the month.  And to think critics of this site called us alarmist for suggesting spam and viruses would consume a lot of bandwidth, or that a neighbor had hacked a router and decided to hop on someone’s account before their ration was used up for the month.  Yet here it is, represented as “common factors” by Sunflower’s own CEO.

As we’ve advocated all along, perhaps a smarter idea is to try and serve Lawrence with a bandwidth pipe bigger than a garden hose and stop artificially limiting demand for a product people want and are willing to pay a reasonable price for.

Knorr said the little-noticed rules and throttling reflect the industry’s concern about the cost of unchecked downloads.

“Offering a truly unlimited service is not a sustainable business model.”

Time Warner Cable’s own results from the first quarter of this year, as well as in its annual report for 2008 dispute that assertion.  They made billions in profits, grew their subscriber base, all while their bandwidth costs continued to decline.

Cablevision, a company larger than Sunflower, is raking in profits offering unchecked downloads and the faster speeds consumers are willing to pay for.

What is the difference?  One company cares about making their customers happy with charging a reasonable price for a great product.  Another company cares about making their numbers and exploiting the lack of equivalent competition on the ground to extract the highest possible return while forcing subscribers to limit their usage.

It’s a truth people across the country have come to learn, but not one at all apparent to at least one reporter at the Kansas City Star.  Time to get out of the pool.