Stop Reporting the Internet is “Free”

Thankfully I’m no relation to the New York Times’ David Carr, else we’d likely have a nasty dust-up during every family get together. Get his latest – he wanefully dreams that it would be nifty if newspapers got together and had a version of iTunes for content:

“Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like [Apple's Steve Jobs] comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.”

Ok, my emphasis added there. The myth that we all get our newspapers for free online is simply not true, and print folks should have been the first to figure this out and harp about it years ago. But it gets perpetuated all the time, as James Poniewozik did last week in Time Magazine:

Now, thanks to the Internet–the big, scary, media-killing Internet–it’s read by millions worldwide. Problem is, those millions read it for free. With the price of information dropping like a bank stock, no one knows how to make money off the media anymore.

Again, emphasis added. Since I’m paying $52.75 a month for broadband internet access, the Internet is not free, yet reporters claim it is. With that reasoning, cable television is free as well. Heck, for the first few years many of us were paying AOL $19.99 a month for access and publishers paid AOL to be listed there.

Exhibit A: Last week Viacom threatened Time Warner Cable with pulling MTV, Niceklodeon, Comedy Central and other channels from 13 million subscribers unless the cable company paid up — an extra $35 million to $40 million. They ‘worked things out,’ which invariably mans an increase will likely be passed along to subscribers at some point.

So a content publisher threatened to withold their original content unless they got a larger piece of the cable television bills that you and I  pay.  And they won. The kicker is that model was in place in the 1980s — well before the Internet took off — and web publishers ignored it. 

Why, for example, does ESPN continue to get a piece of my cable tv bill, but ESPN.com doesn’t get a piece of my broadband payment?

It would be a simple implementation, really, simply block the users at the IP level, with a splash page saying “We’re sorry, but your internet provider does not have rights to display this content. Contact them at [insert phone number here]. There would be armageddon at the cable customer service desks if users couldn’t reach their favorite sites.