America is a global leader, in so many ways including technology. But when it comes to high technology consumption it stands behind a the little country of Estonia, at 24th place in the world. I am talking about internet, a technology that was born and raised here. To make the matters worse, the business cartels (yeah I am talking about the same set of guys who pretty much control oil, energy, cellular and all other lucrative industries with the nexus to politicians), have taken to internet now. One thing that we were proud of in terms of true democracy is now going to be controlled by industry behemoths.
The latest is a so called experiment by Time warner cable, which sells broadband through its Road Runner service. If you live in Beaumont, Texas, an additional meter that you are going to watch for in your house is internet meter. If you have plans to download and watch lots of movies on internet, apart from the bills that iTunes will ring you up with, be ready to pay overage charges for all those gigabytes that were outside your allowed limit. Yeah, kinda like cell phone.
If we really look close, maybe Time warner's move may not be targeted at making money off highest users of their broadband services. Time warner after all is a media company and would want people to watch paid television on their settop boxes rather than on internet and lose revenue to, say, Apple iTunes. So, there appears to be a dark side to the this move. A move that is justified by Time Warner as charging for premium usage.
You think that it's happening there and not going to happen in your 'hood? Think again! Comcast is already toying with this idea. How would the overage charges look? We don't need to look further than peeking over to our neighbor. Bell Canada, which meters service in some plans, charges its customer as much as $7.50 per additional gigabyte of download. A high def movie will cost you something like $30.
Sometime back we were only struggling with the concept of "net-neutrality". What if AT&T starts routing VOIP calls to its own CallVantage service at higher quality of service than to, say, a competitor like Vonage. AT&T is already accused of slowing peer to peer traffic on its networks. FCC isn't talking yet.
Just like the cell phone industry that takes close to $2400 dollar for providing me a contracted 2 year service and there is nothing we can do about it, do consumers need to sit down and watch the industry take control of internet too?
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