Ruling May Increase Price for Internet Service

Christopher Null, a technology writer for Yahoo! News, says that Net (as in network) neutrality is the idea that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally and — more to the point — should come at the same price. Right now, for instance, you don't have to pay more to watch a YouTube video than you do to check your email, even though the YouTube video eats up more bandwidth and, in theory, costs your ISP more for you to watch. Websites and most consumers love the idea of net neutrality. ISPs, on the other hand, are not fans. In fact, the net neutrality movement arose as a response to major ISPs' plans to attempt to charge websites and service providers more for "better" service on their networks. Fail to pay up and that YouTube video might take twice as long to download ... or it may not download at all. ISPs call this the cost of doing business and a necessary reality in an era where bandwidth isn't growing but the amount of data being pushed through the available pipes is. Net neutrality proponents call this extortion. No matter who is right, things were looking up for net neutrality fans after the FCC and the Obama administration came out with specific and strongly worded recommendations and plans that they would push for net neutrality as the Obama broadband program (100Mbps to everyone!) moved forward. But the showdown had already begun prior to the Obama era, way back in 2007, when Comcast, the country's largest cable company, began throttling BitTorrent downloads, effectively putting a speed limit on how fast they could go. The FCC put the kibosh on the practice, and ISPs, led by the mammoth Comcast, sued. Then the FCC announced even more sweeping rules that it planned to enact in the future. Last week, a major legal ruling was handed down in the Comcast case, and the tide has now turned in favor of the ISPs. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals said that the FCC had overstepped its authority in mandating net neutrality and that ISPs should be free to manage traffic however they see fit, noting that under current law, the FCC does not have "untrammeled freedom" to regulate broadband services. (In other words, Congress would have to specifically grant such powers.) The ruling was unanimous among the three judges on the panel. Net neutrality fans find themselves facing a serious uphill climb now. Not only does the ruling open up the way — for now — for ISPs to ask websites and service providers for money; it might also allow them to restrict certain services from running on their networks entirely. Comcast, for example, may not want you to watch Hulu on its service, since then you'd have less of a reason to pay $60 a month for cable TV. It may also be able to ban VOIP services like Skype, so you'll pony up another $20 for wired telephone service. The dominoes are already lining up. What happens now? The FCC has more tricks up its sleeve. Broadband service could be reclassified to fall under the other heavily regulated telecommunications services that the FCC oversees, but that would likely result in additional legal wrangling and longer delays for the broadband plan to go into effect, a so-called nuclear option that would turn the world of broadband into a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare. If it doesn't take this route, the FCC will instead have to ask Congress for the power to implement net neutrality rules as it sees fit, but that's a political game in a time when Washington seems awfully low on political capital. Don't rule out an appeal to the Supreme Court, either. Stay tuned — for as long as your Internet service holds out, anyway.

Build A Better Blog With These Tips

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How to Identify and Cultivate Your Brand’s Mass Influencer

Mass influencers - you know who they are, even if you can’t necessarily identify them specifically. They are the prolific blogger or tweeter with a huge following or audience that not only reads him or her, but follows all posted advice. As reported by MarketingVox, mass influencers can get a rumor started that makes it into mainstream media. They can boost a brand or knock it down with a few well-written posts. They are, in other words, people you want to befriend to hopefully further your brand. The ‘80/16′ Rule Mass influencers make up just 16% of all online Americans, but are responsible for 80 percent of the brand impressions in online social settings, according to Forrester Research. “Social media has created a new type of influencer - one defined not merely by number of friends or frequency of dialogue, but by both,” said Forrester Research Senior Analyst Augie Ray. Brands can succeed with mass influencers by creating programs that energize large numbers of these enthusiasts, Ray says. The challenge, of course, is that retailers do not typically know who their mass influencers are - or what to do once they have identified them. Brand Monitoring One way to find them, of course, is to monitor what is said about your particular brand - an activity that is quickly grabbing more budget share, according to a just-completed survey by BtoB Online and the Web Analytics Association. The “B-to-B Web Analytics Survey” found that nearly half (48.3%) of respondents are already measuring social media and that nearly one quarter (24.3%) said they planned to increase their budgets this year to monitor public sentiment. Group Infuencers into Categories Once you have identified mass influencers, group them into one of two categories, according to Josh Bernoff at Advertising Age. There is influence from people posting within social networks, called influence impressions. “Based on our surveys, we estimate people in the U.S. create 256 billion influence impression on each other in social networks every year,” said Bernoff. Then there is the influence created by blog posts, blog comments, discussion forum posts, and ratings and reviews, called influence posts. “We estimate that people in the U.S. create 1.64 billion influence posts every year,” Bernoff said. “If around 150 people view each of these posts, that’s another 250 billion-plus impressions.” Engage, Evaluate Influencers Regularly Once these influencers are broken down and better understood, begin engaging them often and intelligently, according to Scott Voigt, VP of marketing at Silverpop. As reported in DMNews, Voigt said, “Start building goodwill by … providing them with special benefits. These persuaders can have a huge impact, so make them feel important. You’ll cultivate increased loyalty and give them further incentive to share even more.” Then, according to Voigt, it is time to evaluate your efforts, not once but continually.”Instead of just evaluating a promotion by whether recipients opened and clicked-through on an offer, now you can gauge your success by whether they are sharing your offer and talking about it,” Voigt said. Use the data to adjust and optimize future initiatives, Voigt also said. “For example, if you discover that a new product campaign resulted in a strong uptick in Tweets, you might design a special Twitter-only campaign offering a channel-exclusive discount. Learn from previous hits and misses.”