99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-62- Q2

Episode Date: October 2, 2012

Benjamen Walker had a theory that priority queues are changing the American experience of waiting in line. So he visited amusement parks, highways, and community colleges to find out how these priority queues work and who is using them. What … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So tell me why this is Nareepi. Look man, in the first story, we talked to Dr. Ke... Okay. In the first story, we talked to Dr. Kew at MIT and he told me how America used to be all about the serpentine line that first come first serve Q. This is where one line serves all the available registers,

like the way the airline ticket counter used to be, or Wendy's. But when I asked him if the priority queue might be changing the American experience of waiting in line, he said that I was on to something. A priority line is where you pay to get to the front of the line, where you pay to get to an exclusive, shorter, faster moving line. All right, I think that's good, right?

Did you get to meet me? That is Benjamin Walker. To hear all about Q-theory and design, check out episode number 49 of 99% in visible. Benjamin Walker is Q obsessed. He also did a half hour radio documentary on priority cues for the BBC. I took a trip across the country,

and I visited highways, amusement parks, community colleges to see who was using these priority cues and how they work. But the other thing I found out is that cues can actually help us understand all the fighting that's going on over the internet. You mean like on a message board? No. I'm talking about the internet, the wires and the pipes.

Where do we start? We start with Netflix. Hi, I'm Neil Hunt. I'm the chief product officer at Netflix, and I've been here for about nearly 13 years now, which is pretty scary, and built a lot of the technology that we've used to field both the DVD service

and now the streaming service. Neil's accent has faded a bit, but you can hear he's a Brit. Back 13 years ago, I was incrementally more British speaking than I am today, and Q sort of comes naturally to a Brit as a word to use. In addition, it's a computer science technology word too, so there's sort of two motivations for that happening. And when I drafted the original specification for the thing, the queue was kind of the logical word to use,

and it kind of slipped into product usage. Americans generally don't use the word queue when referring to an order to list or line. Until Netflix was very clear to me at least within months of using the word that it probably was the wrong word for the US market. People see this word QUE and they don't have no idea how to pronounce it. I have had way too many weird pronunciations of that word, from QA to QU to all kinds of weird and wonderful things that it's quite bizarre.

And so I have been lobbying for about a decade to change the word Q to a list or something different. Unfortunately, the marketing department was very attached to the ownable Q word because it's such an unusual word. It's ownable from a brand perspective. And so we've been using Q ever since.

Q and Netflix are somewhat inextricably linked together, I think, in the consumers' mind here in the US. You know, Neil, it seems that you might single-handedly be responsible for how many Americans know this word today. It's kind of, because I would say that you could make a case that because of Netflix, that this word today. I mean it's kind of because I would say that you could make a case that because of Netflix that this word even has the Understanding recognition that's out there today and it seems like it really comes down to you Well, I guess that's possible indeed I'd have to say there's probably things that I'm more proud of introducing to the US consumer of the American public but

It's possible that that's one of them. So there you go. Now of course that most of our business is streaming. The Q is a much less relevant and much less important piece of how we do business. Netflix's future is not in DVDs, but the Q is still central to Netflix's existence because of Comcast. For 85% of Americans who want a high-speed wired connection to their home in the next five years or so, their only choice will be their local cable incumbent. And in 22 of America's 25 largest cities, that local incumbent is Comcast. So they're the information provider, not just the Internet access provider, not just the entertainment provider, not just the sports. They're everything. Susan Crawford is

a law and public policy professor and writer. In her upcoming book, Captive Audience, she warns that Comcast is using its power and market domination to put companies like Netflix out of business. Let's say I'm sick one day and I watch a whole bunch of episodes of Mad Men over my Netflix subscription. And then I wake up the next morning and my broadband bill is higher because I watched Netflix. That's what Comcast is trying to put in place. This idea that

any video from anybody other than them is gonna do nothing but make your broadband bill higher. It's actually brutal because what it does is train consumers not to want to watch Netflix. Netflix. In this practice of treating Comcast's own streaming video differently than the video from third parties like HBO Go, Hulu, and Netflix has been criticized publicly by the CEO of Netflix read Hastings in particular, and net neutrality advocates in general. The idea of net neutrality is that all data on the internet is treated equally. At least all the data of a given type is treated equally, so all video should arrive to your

computer or TV without any prioritization or discrimination based on where that video is coming from. And Susan Crawford may be able to watch Mad Men all day long, but her concern about the cable companies and net neutrality goes way beyond streaming video. Focusing on Netflix in some ways is a little misleading because it's just an application like another. Imagine instead that what you were trying to do was a backup of all your files on your computer. You'd need a really good connection to allow you to do that. And if you're a small business, you'll be doing that every day.

What if there was an actor, a bully standing in the middle, who could charge whatever he wanted to for your ability to run your business? Any high bandwidth application is actually subject to this kind of highway robbery that Comcast is able to carry out. What Susan Crawford wants us to understand is that if companies like Comcast succeed in cabling the internet, then they'll routinely use their power

to single out a type of service or a type of data and prioritize some and discriminate against others. And this was not how the internet was originally designed to function. It's a totally different model. You can think of it this way. We have these two models that are clashing like planets. And one model is definitely winning the cable model. The other planet is the basic idea of telecommunications

infrastructure, where everybody gets the same service at a reasonable price, and that allows all kinds of interesting things to happen. It's what's called common carriage or universal service. These basic ideas that everybody in society gets access to communications. Common carriage, this is really what's at the heart of the net neutrality debate. It's the idea that access to telecommunications should be transparent, affordable, fair, and predictable.

Sort of like a good old-fashioned cue. Cues are the essence of democracy in that they're predictable. You can see when you're going to get to the front of the line. No one gets special treatment. You're all standing in a line. In fact, you're policing each other. If someone cuts an align, people get pretty irritated. The opposite of that, in a sense, is a system that's only driven by money, where people buy preference to get to their

place in line or decide what services they get access to. What's happened in communications is that what we used to think of as a basic affordance at everybody-guided at a reasonable price has become more and more within the sphere of markets. The problem with attaching a market to a communications infrastructure issue is that this ideal predictability, knowing what you're gonna get and being treated

just the same as everybody else goes out the window. Net neutrality advocates like Susan Crawford argue that cable companies like Comcast need to be policed and regulated because they don't consider their networks part of America's information infrastructure. This is why we never had a telephone neutrality debate because the telephone was considered a vital component of America's telecommunications. It used to be that all Americans had a telephone and they could call anybody they wanted to.

That was our basic communications infrastructure. We subsidized the very poorest Americans so that they could be sure to have a telephone line. And the telephone company had no say over what business you transacted using that line. As time went by, cable actors got into providing telephone service as well. Now internet access, they don't see themselves as providing a democratic public service function and they have really held on to the right to just charge

whatever they want for access to that wire and raise prices whenever they feel like it. The cable companies argue that net neutrality regulations would be burdensome and unnecessary. Market competition, they say, protects the American consumer. But Susan Crawford, who was part of Obama's 2009 FCC transition team, says competition disappeared a long time ago. We used to think that competition between the telephone companies and the cable guys would protect Americans. And on that basis back in 2002, we deregulated the entire sector.

No more federal oversight, go ahead charge whatever you want, because competition will be the cop on the beat. If you remember back over a decade ago, there used to be tons of internet service providers, and it never really occurred to me why all those options went away and a cable company became the only option for a lot of people when it comes to high-speed internet, and it all boils down to something fundamental in the internet infrastructure, the wires. The telephone companies had old copper wiring that couldn't handle internet network traffic. And they just kind of gave up.

The telephone companies realized it was just too expensive to dig up their old copper wires and replace them with fiber. By contrast, all the cable companies have to do to upgrade the service they offer is to update the electronics. Don't have to dig up the wire, just put new gear on the back of your wires. Which is really cheap and comparison. That cost advantage on the cable side has been so great that the telephone companies have simply dropped out. And the cable companies won by default. Leaving us with absolutely no cop in the beat, we've

got the worst of both worlds, neither competition nor oversight. In the end, it's more like the worst of three worlds, because when we turn over the future of the internet to a cable company, Susan Crawford says, we don't even get a future. What this all amounts to is nothing more than just an entertainment service, rather than

something that produces new forms of making living, new jobs, new ways of inventing valuable things for the rest of the world. We won't have that sandbox to play with. Other countries will, but we won't. In America, we may have to get used to being at the back of the line. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Benjamin Walker from the radio program, Too Much Information from WFMU, with a little help from me, Roman Mars, and Sam Greenspan. We are a project of KALW91.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

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