Have Couch Potatoes Killed the Internet Dream?

So he says:

Couch potatoes have killed the internet dream. http://t.co/uPMUWI8gNa

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) October 26, 2014

But I think the news is actually far less depressing. The core piece of supposed “evidence” in the article is contained in this sentence:

Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all internet traffic in the United States during prime-time hours.

Right now, as I blog this on a Saturday night, it takes me less than 1MB of data to write this post, and upload it for everybody to see. While somewhere else in the house, one of my youngsters watches a Netflix video, whose recommended broadband speed is 1.5Mb per second. In the maybe 10 minutes it takes me to write this post, Netflix will have streamed more than 100MB of data — and more if it’s an HD show.

Just because Netflix (and YouTube, owned by Google) take 100-times-plus as much data to keep one person entertained on-line for the same time as do some other activities, that does not mean that 100 people are being couch potatoes and one is not.

I’d love to know whether this is true:

Of course the internet of our (utopian) dreams hasn’t ceased to exist. It’s just that it’s becoming a minority sport.

but, dear John Naughton, writing for the Guardian, you cannot tell from looking simply at how many bytes flow.