Okay, wait a minute. The airlines? I had to read that twice to make sure Lyons was actually recommending that companies like Comcast and Time Warner –  you know, two of the lowest-ranked U.S. companies in terms of customer satisfaction – ought to be taking marketing tips from the industry that rivals them for most-hated status. (Interestingly, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the airlines are third from the bottom, followed by… the cable industry!)

Opaque pricing models are opaque for a reason

This seems to me to be just awful advice (Disclosure: see below). One of the primary reasons consumers hate the airline industry as a whole is precisely because of standards of pricing that make no sense, are unnecessarily opaque and completely unpredictable. Certainly, there are other issues consumers gripe about, like on-time arrival (something they also share with cablecos, who sometimes, maybe show up between 8 and never), but at best, their pricing model simply makes no sense to the consumer, and at worst seems suspect and predatory.

Consider the confounding and inconsistent factors consumers have to wrestle with when trying to figure out how they can “use” a gigabyte (or, for many consumers, trying to figure out what one even is).  How do you know when you’ve used one?  Or are close to using one?  If some things are “under the cap” and other things “count,” how can you tell?  And why is that so?  Will the number of gigabytes of, say, a streamed movie, be listed along with movie ratings and reviews when searching for one – and if not, how will you know if you’re “allowed” to watch it?  Do security updates count?  Skype or Facetime?  The home Wi-Fi network that your neighbor’s kid set up for you?  And what happens when you go over the cap?  Will my TV suddenly turn off?

Make up your mind: Is it costs or capacity?

In January 2013, National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) president Michael Powell clarified in a speech that cable’s interest in data caps was no longer (or never was) about network congestion but instead about pricing fairness.

I had to read that one twice, too. So what of the angst over bandwidth hogs and bytes and bits and network management and capacity constraints? That’s not actually true? Well, okay, if the new argument is about how companies recover their investments and fairly allocate those costs then we can all agree that is quite reasonable. But if that is the case, then changes the debate to one about pricing (costs) and not about capacity (caps).

There are plenty of ways to address pricing that fairly charges customers without requiring them to pursue an engineering degree or a private investigator to figure it out. Let’s be clear: Broadband is not like electricity, where utilities must first generate the power they deliver to customers, requiring them to charge heavy users more because it costs the utilities more to serve them. Even the ISPs themselves allow that marginal costs for additional bandwidth are negligible between light and heavy broadband users.

A pricing model that works: the current one

Indeed, ISPs already have a way to offer consumers different price options for internet access – it’s called speed. If you are a comparatively light internet user who goes online primarily to send email and surf the web, you can buy a lower-speed tier and save yourself some cash. If you don’t see daylight much, and use your connection to watch a ton of online video, you’ll probably need to upgrade to (and yes, pay for) something faster.

Virtually all ISPs use this pricing model already which, it turns out, works pretty well. Most consumers don’t know a gigabyte from a hole in the ground, but they do know when their internet connection is slow. Pricing by speed offers consumers predictability on their monthly bills and an understanding of what they’re paying for. With data cap-based “penalty” fees there’s a big chance they’ll instead get a nasty bill shock at the end of the month and then wonder what on God’s green earth they did to deserve it.

Disclosure: The author’s company, Glen Echo Group, has a number clients involved in the broadband field representing a spectrum of interests: from the Alliance for Broadband Competition, to Gig U,. to Google, to Sprint, among others. See a full list here: glenechogroup.com.

Maura Corbett is the president and founder of the Glen Echo Group, in Washington, D.C.

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Or so writes Eric Klinker, in the Harvard Business Review blog, in a solid post about how we’re going to manage the growth of the internet. While Klinker sounds like many a telco-funded astroturfer in his worries about ISP profits, he’s actually the CEO of file sharing site, BitTorrent. And his arguments are worth listening to on both sides of the internet divide — the ISPs and the content companies looking to ride those pipes.

In the post, which is similar in spirit to one he wrote for GigaOM in 2011, he agues that the problem on the Internet is congestion, and that there are far more ways to address congestion than just adding more lanes. And of course as the CEO of BitTorrent, which has a proprietary file transfer system that is composed of masses of distributed computers, his main idea is distributed computing. From the article:

Distributed computing systems work with unprecedented efficiency. You don’t need to build server farms, or new networks, to bring an application to life. Each computer acts as its own server; leveraging existing network connections distributed across the entirety of the internet. BitTorrent is a primary example of distributed computing systems at work. Each month, via BitTorrent, millions of machines work together to deliver petabytes of data across the web, to millions of users, at zero cost. And BitTorrent isn’t the only example of distributed technology at work today. Skype uses distributed computing systems to deliver calls. Spotify uses distributed computing systems to deliver music.

The challenges associated with this are obvious. Customers have to download clients in order to use such networks, and they will still affect the end user’s connection at the last mile or in the airwaves and at cell sites on mobile networks. Thus, they can tax ISP networks (although they can be optimized). But with video a huge driver of congestion on the consumer side, it’s a solution that could work, since people will download software in order to watch TV. Even ISPs have tested distributed computing when they tried out the P4P network protocol way back in 2008.

Distributed computing would force many popular web services to reconsider how they build their applications and stream their files, which could have a large effect on big web sites such as Facebook or Google as well as content companies and content delivery networks. Another option, and one that we’re inching toward, is smart routers and prioritization schemes where the user can set their own network parameters to best use the bandwidth they have available. Software-defined networks will also make such prioritization easier and cheaper to manage inside the core telco network as well.

There’s also a more controversial idea of ISPs charging more for broadband during peaks times, as opposed to current data caps that limit people no matter if they download information at 2AM or during prime time. True congestion pricing would also force users to bear to cost of overburdening the ISP network, although ISPs would then have to be open about how often their networks are congested and would risk consumers losing their appetite for broadband. My hunch is that neither the ISPs or the content companies want that to happen, although it’s still far from clear that upgrades are the death knell for the cable and telco companies, as opposed to a painful shift in their margin profiles.

Regardless, we’re only asking for more broadband and more internet services, so Klinker’s article is a welcome reminder that none of that will come for free.

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This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

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The update got pushed out on Wednesday, with one of its new features being a beta ad-blocker. And, according to multiple apoplectic sources, the ad-blocker is turned on by default, once the user resets their set-top box.

As the Rude Baguette blog has noted, savvy users can switch the whitelist-free ad-blocking service off through the online FreeBox management portal. Others have also pointed out that the ad-blocking doesn’t actually work very well, although it is partially effective (that’ll be why they call it a beta version then). There’s also the fact that many people already employ ad-blocking plugins on the client side.

Just to be as fair as possible to Free here, it’s not yet clear whether the ISP actually meant to have the feature turn itself on as a default – again, betas are buggy. I’ve also asked Free for comment, without success.

So, assuming that this was an intentional move… wow. The irony of the situation is just stunning. For this is the same Free that is being investigated by the French telecoms regulator over its alleged treatment of YouTube traffic.

If Free really is intentionally degrading or blocking YouTube – a matter for the regulator ARCEP to determine – then its actions are one of the clearest violations yet of the net neutrality principle. And why do ISPs violate net neutrality? Generally because they either want to throttle a competitor to their own services, or they want to use traffic degradation as leverage in their ongoing quest to get high-volume traffic sources to pay them money.

And how do high-volume traffic sources make money? Uh, advertising, which is still pretty much the lifeblood of the online content industry, at least for now. It’s too early to draw conclusions about what’s intended here, but the fallout of Free’s new beta feature should be quite entertaining to watch.

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As part of its investigation, the regulator is also probing three other unnamed companies. The perception is that ISPs in France are either under-investing in infrastructure or violating the spirit of network neutrality, the idea that ISPs should not discriminate on traffic traveling over their pipes. Yet, in France, it seems that at least some in the government are willing to make Google pay for the ability to guarantee that ISP customers can receive its bits, turning the internet into Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, with ISPs and governments tying it down. The question is, will what happens in France happen elsewhere?

The ARCEP investigation and user complaints

Early this year, communications regulator ARCEP will rule on an investigation it opened on November 22 following complaints that video streaming services including YouTube are often too slow to watch. Now three French senators are also calling on the country’s digital economy minister to take action.

ARCEP stepped up when a survey of over 16,000 ISP customers by French consumer group UFC Que Choisir found 83 percent of Free customers, 47 percent of Orange customers and 46 percent of SFR customers were unable to use YouTube properly.

Since the investigation began, many users have reportedly noted an improvement in connection quality, but connections remain patchy.

And this issue is not limited to Google. “The quality of connection is inadequate in almost all operators,” said UFC Que Choisir’s survey, which found that France’s native Dailymotion, ironically, is slowest to access through France Telecom’s own Orange ISP, which owns almost half of the YouTube rival. And 25 percent of consumers reported slow-downs while watching broadcaster TF1′s MyTF1 catchup service.

Is it under-investment or a desire to make content companies pay?

UFC Que Choisir says these symptoms may be caused by under-investment in infrastructure as well as commercial tensions between ISPs, which deliver web services to the end user but which don’t pay for the infrastructure. It has called on the government to define quality-of-access rules, in part by allowing the competition regulator ARCEP to build a quality-of-service observatory. Similarly, in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission is also trying to figure out how to measure the quality of a broadband connection beyond just looking at speeds.

Inter-company tensions do appear to be at play. A case before another public agency — France’s competition regulator, the Autorité De La Concurrence — in September illustrates how ISPs eager for revenue from web content companies can hold the user experience hostage.

Cogent, which handles YouTube’s peering interconnections, had complained to the competition authority that Orange had refused its connections, wanting more money to add ports to connect Cogent traffic to its networks. Much of the interconnections between large ISPs, CDNs and web content companies are negotiated by private deals, so it’s rare to see the government get involved, or even to hear much about them publicly. In the U.S., when Level 3 and Comcast became embroiled in a public peering fight after Level 3 started sending Netflix traffic over its connections with Comcast, the FCC refused to get involved, and both parties settled the disagreement.

But in this case, the competition regulator said one ISP was within its rights to charge more money from services hoping to reach its subscribers. This so-called double-sided business model has been sought by ISPs who argue that companies such as Google are freeloaders making huge profits off the pipes of owned by the ISPs. In contract, Google and other content companies argue that their services are the reason customers upgrade to higher speeds and continue paying ISPs money.

And in France the ISP argument has gained at least one supporter in the Autorité De La Concurrence. The authority says France Telecom is offering interconnection prices significantly below market value, and it has accepted the telco’s undertakings to ensure transparency.

French policymakers generally are generally in the mood to extract more money from Google. They have already set such wheels in motion around taxation and copyright fees. Now infrastructure could be the next arena. But its unclear how far France will go.

It’s one thing to try to ensure that consumers have an acceptable connection to support online video, through implementing some kind of standards. It’s another to get between participants in peering disputes, and to possibly start setting rates.

The U.S. fight is bigger than France’s

But such fights are becoming more common as the stakes over the internet and web video get higher. ISPs are worried about the cost of delivering video traffic over their networks, while also losing out on the ability to charge users for pay TV packages that significantly boost their revenue. Meanwhile, consumers are demanding more video online because they can choose what to watch, when they want to watch it, on any device.

The French competition authority’s earlier investigation referred only to two individual companies at loggerheads in a specific peering fight. But the new inquiry by the communications regulator is much wider, looking at industry-wide practices around infrastructure and interconnection. And it comes following consumer outcry — identified in UFC Que Choisir’s survey — to which politicians may be keen to respond.

The outcome will be important because Google is already facing having to pay to re-use news content in some parts of Europe through both commercial agreements and possible new legislation that suggest excerpting is chargeable. That could set new precedents for the online content economy.

The French broadband outcome will be important because it will set up a precedent for other telecom regulators who are struggling with similar issues. Creating standards to ensure that customers have a quality online video experience is no simple task and may well require investment by ISPs, especially those on older technologies or oversubscribed networks.

As for the peering issues, if the government decides to step into the fray there, it could be setting the internet up for regulations that put governments in the role of determining who can connect to whom and how much they can charge. The OECD recently made a convincing argument that such regulations and government involvement would hurt the web and the economic development of companies dependent on the web. So what France does here might have influence far beyond its borders.

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Cisco has hired a banker to peddle the networking giant’s Linksys wireless router business, while Google has been shopping the set-top box business it acquired when it purchased Motorola in May. The business motivation behind these sales contain insights about how television services are delivered in the home and present an opportunity that ISPs could take advantage of if they want to keep customers hooked on their boxes in order to maintain a device inside the consumer’s premise.

Most people are aware that their TVs, their gaming consoles, their Blu-Ray players and an assortment of other devices are now able to deliver content from a widening array of services such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon. From a practical standpoint, this means consumers may find their entertainment centers less cluttered with Rokus, Boxee Boxes or maybe even a dedicated Blu-Ray player. This means consumers can get rid of myriad boxes, but the question is whether or not they will ever see the end of the set top box provided by their cable provider.

Some analysts, and even a few cable execs believe this day is coming. Already pay TV providers are eying channel guides and video on demand shows in the cloud instead of on a box. The set-top box in most cases provides three things, authentication, channel guides and a hard drive to store content. But as cable providers look for more interactive channel guides or recommendation technology, moving those off the box makes sense. Meanwhile Comcast has aggressively been moving toward streaming of its on-demand shows to meet customer’s demands to watch content on any device.

Better Wi-Fi could be an ISP selling point

And that brings us to the opportunity that ISPs are missing. While Cisco may see the Linksys business as played out, I think the idea of better home Wi-Fi is finally here and ISPs are the ones who could provide it. Many Americans get their wireless routers from their ISPs integrated as part of the modem. This made the Linksys (or any other) routers less of a necessity over time (although I can still remember hiding mine in the early days of Wi-Fi when the cable repair man came over because my provider charged a $10 Wi-Fi fee for customers bold or tech savvy enough to use their own router). However, I still don’t use the integrated Wi-Fi router that comes standard in my cable modem, because it’s terrible.

And therein lies the opportunity for ISPs. They need to build better Wi-Fi into routers and advanced controls so users can tweak their networks for their own usage — especially for video sent over home Wi-Fi networks. Then, ISPs will get the advantage of having a certified box inside a customer’s home, even as those boxes are integrated into software and cloud-based services.

Even though ISPs may love the cloud and the cool features it provides on the set top box, and even though they might no longer see a need for caching content inside the home to offset some of the demands on the last mile network, they still want a presence in the consumer home. They may call it the modem or the set-top box or a gateway, but they want a place to manage the flows of packets and deliver the quality of service customers expect. Without that box, they may as well be dumb pipes.

What boxes and features do you really need?

So, let’s see better routers. For example, a year ago Time Warner cable installed a combo modem/router in my home that offers 802.11n, but with 802.11a/c routers hitting the market this past year that support faster data rates in the 5GHz band for things like video, it’s worth looking at an upgrade. However, the life of ISP consumer equipment can be long, which means if I used that modem and router I’d be stuck using technology that will likely mean my Netflix viewing pixelates when more than one of us are watching a show.

Another option for telcos are services such as the one ASSIA provides to DSL users. The company’s new Wi-Fi Management product was released in October, and helps ensure a better Wi-Fi experience in the home by managing the throughput of the networks in the home and back to the telco’s central office. That’s a service worth having, and if Time Warner offered it I might actually use its router (ASSIA right now can only offer the access line support for telcos deploying its DSL tech).

So maybe the company that decides to buy Linksys can see if there’s a market for selling service providers better Wi-Fi routers along with their modems. Because otherwise, as integration on the consumer hardware side continues, ISPs might end up seeing their presence in the home dwindle down to a basic modem — or worse, a coaxial or DSL jack in the wall.

No wonder Google doesn’t want to be in the business.

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The Sandvine post noted that, “No single application was responsible for the surge; usage patterns were, for the most part, similar to what is observed on weekday evenings.” While the uptick in entertainment seems obvious, the results should encourage those worried about whether our networks can handle some problem that forces workers to stay home and attempt to telecommute. Apparently they can, or they can until the power goes out and the floodwaters swamp the telecommunications infrastructure.

Hurricane Sandy photo courtesy of Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

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NetZero became a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in March, buying time on Clearwire’s WiMAX. It even stuck with to its free-access dial-up roots by offering a gratis 200 MB for one year to any customer who buys a 4G hotspot or dongle. Its paid plans, however, look much more like the traditional mobile broadband offerings: starting at $10 for 500 MB and scaling up to $50 for 4 GB.

The new gifting features, however, throw that traditional model for a curve. Every customer – even the ones of free plans – will get the 1 GB data allotment, which they can award in 200 MB increments to any other NetZero customer with a Facebook account. Though a customer can’t “gift” himself any of that data, his or her friends certainly can. Each customer can receive up to five 200 MB awards a month from Facebook friends for a total of 1 GB. That means for a monthly subscription of fee of exactly zero dollars, a NetZero customer could rack up as much as 1.2 GB of data to use each month.

The MVNO space has become a fascinating laboratory of new mobile voice and data business models. The recently launched FreedomPop and Solavei have been exploring the concept of using social networks to create stickiness with their brands, to virally market their services and as a platform on which to build other IP services. Karma, another Clearwire MVNO that has yet to launch, is pioneering the concept of “social bandwidth,” which encourages customers to share their connections with strangers in exchange for data bonuses.

NetZero is taking pieces of each of those strategy, though its implementation is all its own. Instead of building its own social network, it’s relying on Facebook to provide that friendship glue. The promise of free data not only keeps its customers engaged with the service – with no contracts they can leave at any time – but encourages communities of friends to engage with NetZero and recruit new members since those friends are ultimately the source of monthly data bonuses.

The question is whether giving away that much free data is a sustainable business model, especially if many of NetZero’s customers aren’t bringing in any revenue. NetZero has also the cut the price of its modems in half since its March launch. You could look at that as a temporary incentive coinciding with the launch of its new sharing program. Or it could be a sign it hasn’t had much luck in bringing customers on board. Slashing hardware costs and giving away gobs of free data is one way to attract customers, but I doubt it’s a strategy NetZero can keep up indefinitely.

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In what must have been a heck of a last-minute push, Google managed to sign up several neighborhoods that weren’t looking like they would get Google’s service. As of Friday afternoon when I had counted 21,000 people having pre-registered for the service I noted at least 50 areas — what Google calls fiberhoods — that hadn’t yet made the cut and most were in low-income neighborhoods.

When Google announced its plans to offer a gigabit service for $70 a month plus the $300 one-time connection fee as well as a free 5 Mbps service that allowed registrants to pay the $300 connection fee up front or over a period of 1 year at $25 a month, it also opened up a new way of signing up for the service.

The search giant had divided the residents of Kansas City (in both Missouri and Kansas) into different areas called fiberhoods. It then asked residents to pre-register for the service and gave them six weeks to get their neighbors on board as well. The fiberhoods with the most interest would get fiber first, and in order to get fiber, enough residents had to sign up. From today’s Google blog post on the end of the pre=registration period:

Three fiberhoods reached their goals on the very first day of our announcement and from there, you just took off, encouraging your friends and neighbors to pre-register. The momentum has been terrific—63 fiberhoods qualified in the past week alone. From Hanover Heights, which qualified for Fiber in just two hours, to Ivanhoe Southeast, Coronado and more, which just qualified in the last few hours, your response has been tremendous.

Google says on Thursday it will name the neighborhoods where it will first deploy its gigabit goods and the order in which all the other fiberhoods will get connected. It also said that the “fiberhoods” that did not qualify will get a second chance. The blog post says: “If you live in one of those fiberhoods, we want you to know that we’ve heard your concerns. We will include you in a future rally sometime next year, when you can try to qualify for Fiber again.”

While Google hasn’t disclosed numbers of pre-registered subscribers, it has surpassed my expectations when it comes to the number of neighborhoods where it will deploy fiber. The benefit of getting even the minimum number of people signed up in neighborhoods is that Google will then deploy gigabit service to select schools and community centers, where even residents who didn’t sign up can see the Internet at gigabit speeds. Hopefully that will prompt greater adoption.

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But will it be enough to be profitable? Dave Burstein, a telecoms reporter and analyst, estimates that it would need a take rate of between 20 and 30 percent to be profitable.

There are still two days left for residents to sign up for the service — the deadline is midnight on Sunday, and Google will then determine which areas get fiber first, based in part on the number and density of signups. I made my count around noon PT, so that number is subject to change. Once Google announces the lucky fiberhoods, it will send out trucks to connect those homes to the Google network. At the July launch of Google Fiber, Milo Medin — the VP of access technologies for Google — estimated that once the neighborhoods are chosen, and Google sends out its technicians to the neighborhoods, residents there might have the service in about a week.

That’s exciting for the residents of Dubs Dread and Greenway Fields, where currently 41 percent and 50 percent of the homes in the fiberhood have signed up for Google’s $70-a-month Internet or $120-a-month TV and Internet service. Google also has a free 5 Mbps service if residents pay the $300 connection fee, either up front or spread out over two one year at $25 a month.

Milo Medin at the Google Fiber announcement.

However, there are plenty of residents in Kansas City who are concerned about how few lower-income neighborhoods are making the cut. The Kansas City Star has published several letters from people noting that the Google offering isn’t helping bridge the digital divide, with some writers pointing out that in some areas people predominantly rent their homes, and their landlords aren’t choosing to connect, and others firing off against Google’s tactics.

Of most concern to many of these residents is that Google will also connect community institutions such as fire stations, libraries, parks and schools with its service if enough people sign up. For residents of neighborhoods who can’t meet the threshold to get a gig in their fiberhood, the loss of not only their chance to get a gig connection at home but also the chance to connect their schools, rankles.

It’s been enough of a problem that Google last Friday said it would adjust some of the thresholds in certain neighborhoods based on a reworking of the number of residents and other information. The Kansas City star also reports that Google is sending people out to knock on doors to try to get residents in those neighborhoods to sign up.

The other aspect that’s likely worrying residents is that if they don’t pre-register before Sunday, it’s unclear when they might get the Google Fiber service if they decide they want it later. A Google spokeswoman said that Google would offer residents in fiberhoods that have already qualified another opportunity to get service at a later point in time, but that she didn’t have details yet on how that process would work.

And while this fits in with the way Google is trying to lower the cost of deploying broadband, it is not the most familiar or customer-friendly way to offer a service. Before the Internet, it’s hard to imagine very many situations where you would have to get enough of your friends to participate before you get to buy tickets to a movie or to get your teeth cleaned. And try telling people that unless they pre-order a book on Amazon the publisher won’t sell that book to them — until it became convenient again for the publishing company — and most people would balk.

Yet these models do work in certain industries, such as buying a home in a planned development or even trying to snag a deal at a pop up retail store. Google is just bringing it to communications which means residents are having to adjust to a new reality.

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