Comcast paid an un-fucking-believable $125 million for DailyCandy — just a simple shopping e-newsletter, if you're not familiar with it — just over a year ago, greatly enriching former AOL exec Bob Pittman, who had previously acquired it for $3 million. Amid all the investment, DailyCandy expanded from New York to London, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Dallas, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle and Philly.

DailyCandy will now stop publishing city-specific editions in all but five of those 12 cities: New York, London, LA, Chicago and San Francisco. Subscribers in the other cities will now receive an "Everywhere" edition, supplemented with local news and events twice a week.

Perhaps you've heard the President talk about "net neutrality." That's the idea that the Internet should continue in on its merry way: people can go to the sites they like, do what they want and their web providers will allow them to do so. It's really quite utopian. Well, that practice could come to an end if evil telecommunications giants have their way.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Assn. and its ilk think that providers should reserve the right to pick-and-choose which sites get preferential treatment on their bandwidth. More than that, they're toying with the idea of increasing rates for video sites, meaning those of you who watch movies or television on your computer could pay more than people who use it simply for news and the such. According to the association, this is simply how the market works. And does it ever!

The current marketplace is working well to bring consumers the services and features they want at prices they can afford. Lawmakers should be very reluctant to replace that flexible, market-driven success story with a system of intrusive regulation.

Though the Obama administration insists it will fight for net neutrality, it may be in for quite the fight. Telecommunications companies give millions to lawmakers — Comcast employees and its PAC, which is fighting against net neutrality, spent $2.9 million in the political realm during the 2008 election and has already given about $700,000 since then — and, as we all know, lawmakers aren't immune to hefty checks. (It's worth noting that the FCC slapped Comcast's wrist last year, when the company put up barriers to block or slow down file-sharing services.)

Luckily for all of us, new FCC head Julius Genachowski vowed to back Obama and company, saying:

One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles.

This would please the New York Times, whose editorial team demanded this weekend that the President keep the Internet open and free.

The issue isn't simply about money — making it and spending it — but about which sites load faster or are more accessible. If, for example, one Internet provider prefers NBC News, that means CBS readers will be shit out of luck. And, if that's the case, we'll be one step closer to this "destroyed democracy" thing Glenn Beck and others keep barking about.

As much as some would like to believe it, the free market's not our democracy's defining characteristic. Nor should it be. And if there's one place to prove that, it's here, on the wild, wild Internet. Regardless of what happens, it's clear that the Internet won't be what it once was — and that makes us sad.

Image via aLii's flickr.

Boing Boing blogger David Pescovitz writes about Comcast Town, a virtual world:

Comcast (a BB sponsor) ...

We stopped reading there, too. Pescovitz invites users to judge Boing Boing's entry into Comcast's virtual-world contest. Readers are eager to judge Boing Boing, but not about that.

They have wasted no time reminding Pescovitz of the only Comcast stories they're prepared to hear: Tales of FCC hearings packed with Comcast shills, installers falling asleep on Comcast customers' couches, and the evils of Comcast's war on file sharing and other bandwidth-heavy uses of their network.

It makes everyone look stupid: The Boing Boingers, for thinking they could take Comcast's money and escape criticism; Comcast, for entering the lion's den already smeared in blood; and Boing Boing readers, for thinking the blog had any credibility left to get up in arms about. We'll give the Boingers this much: At least it wasn't a promo for their latest book.

The clip (do we even need to mention that it's NSFW?) from ClubJenna, apparently meant to broadcast on the Shorteez channel but instead spliced into KVOA's feed of the football game, is but one of the many porn channels from which Comcast makes a healthy profit. Across the industry, porn accounts for more than a quarter of pay-per-view revenues. Cue a round of handwringing among the media. Comcast customers have better purposes for their hands.

As it should be. It's always at the height of a bubble that some fad — bandwidth delivery! online ad-networks! social media marketing management! — starts looking like a sure thing. But most startups fail, tech startups included. Few make any money for their investors; VCs, like Hollywood studios, live off the hits.

What to do if you work at the 17th Ajax-enabled online calendar to hit the market, the 217th YouTube clone, the 397th online-ad network ? Give up, move on. Despite the headlines, people are still hiring — even, sometimes, as they shed jobs. Wall Street may have failed in its job at allocating capital. But Silicon Valley's particular genius is in matching talent to markets.

So embrace it! The world has countless real problems to solve. You're not going to make a fortune copying someone else's idea. Come up with your own genuinely good one, and you'll never have to read about your company's fire sale in Valleywag.

No. Metcalfe literally ate his words two years after his prediction. In the decade since, Internet infrastructure upgrades continue to outpace growth. So even though worldwide traffic grew by half last year, peak utilization is now less than 50 percent of available capacity. Don't believe out-of-date claims about "last mile" bottlenecks, either. Home broadband users have been built out to more traffic than they're using. Comcast's caps are about per-customer profitability, not system overload. If anything, you should feel encouraged to use the Net even more. Just make sure your ISP is willing to let you have at it. (Photo by zinkwazi)

The problem for Comcast and other Internet service providers is that they can no longer block file-sharing traffic from their networks. And yet file-sharing usage is consuming more and more bandwidth, which they must pay for. Broadband providers are businesses, not charities. So they are increasingly considering charging their users by the bit for bandwidth over a certain level. Most users won't be affected, but file-sharing downloaders will be.

The prospect of pay-by-the-bit bandwidth had immediate consequences for BitTorrent's two main businesses: an online-media store delivered via file sharing, and a content-delivery network which competed with the likes of Akamai and Limelight Networks.

For users who would have to pay bandwidth fees to their ISPs on top of paying the usual charges, BitTorrent's Torrent Entertainment Network store would soon look uncompetitive with the likes of Apple's iTunes Store and Microsoft's Xbox Marketplace — which prompted Best Buy to back out of talks to acquire TEN for $15 million.

As for BitTorrent's content-delivery network, it was premised on the notion that BitTorrent would negotiate with ISPs to get privileged delivery for their file-sharing packets, while Comcast blocked others. With the FCC forcing Comcast to treat all file-sharing traffic equally, the promise of that business evaporated.

Which leaves BitTorrent with not much of a business. As the first Napster showed, peer-to-peer file sharing is easy to make popular — and surpassingly hard to make profitable. BitTorrent may have improved on Napster's technology. But it never solved the fundamental business problem.

What's important is that if the vote passes, it will set a precedent that strengthens the FCC's claim on jurisdiction over regulating the Internet by giving some teeth to the agency's Internet Policy Statement from 2005. Republican chairman Kevin Martin can count on majority, thanks to the support of the two Democrats on the commission, and the motion is expected to pass.

But not unanimously, as Republican commissioner Robert McDowell doesn't approve. He penned a dissenting opinion piece in the Washington Post arguing for the preservation of the laissez faire status quo for ISPs: "If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions." (Photo by AP/Stephan Savoia)

"It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said in an interview. It’s another, she said, when the company replies. “I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

In her preposterously self-fawning online biography, Gardner writes: "I am, in short, a product of the Web. I am a mashup." All too true.

Why do all of these people who live online, constantly communicating, persist in some kind of paranoid delusion that no one listens to them? Lyza, if you have something to say to Comcast, don't tell your Twitter followers one thing and the nice white man from Philadelphia another. Stick to your guns. Stab them in the face, not the back. Your Web-development clients should wonder what you spit about them when they're not on Twitter.