NEW YORK (AP) — You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?
Time Warner Cable Inc. customers — and, later, others — may have to, if the company’s test of metered Internet access is successful.
On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.
Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable’s subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president of advanced technology.
Just 5 percent of the company’s subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.
“We think it’s the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure,” Leddy said.
As one commenter on my current.com story wrote:
This is in no way analogous to cell phone minutes. You’re not inhibiting small businesses or minute heavy companies when charging for minutes on a cellphone, but when you penalize bandwidth, you limit what is possible online and create a tiered system that goes against the egalitarian nature of the Intern
I could understand these upcharges if these companies were drastically improving service or improving our telecommunications infrastructure, but that does not appear to be the case. Not to mention the fact that they have been making money off of the use of what I consider to be the commons (considering the fact that cable does run under and over public property) and most U.S. residents do NOT have a choice when it comes to broadband. Some may be able to choose between two of the telecom giants, but there don’t seem to be ANY middle or small market ISPs anymore. Not like when I first jumped online in 1996. Just look at the mobile market, there are competitors sure, but they all seem to offer the exact same rate packages. Much like other oligopolized (new word!) industries such as mobile, oil, and pharmaceuticals, there is a revolting amount of collusion to keep prices high so that everybody wins–except the consumers.
Can anyone deny that this medium has proved absolutely vital to the health and vitality of our democracy considering the historic candidacy and campaign of Barack Obama? If this sort of metering is allowed to be implemented across the board (as I’m certain it will), it is democracy that will suffer through the diminished usage of sites such as Youtube, Current, and other essential people-powered media. 15gigs ain’t shit when you’re as active a participant in this movement as I tend to be. I also would not be surprised to see the telecoms start to allow users to view select ‘partner’ sites that will be exempt from this metering. It is this stage that will be the undoing of all our hard work to bypass and eradicate the traditional establishment media stranglehold on our socio-political discourse.
If you’d like to learn more about how to stop this trend from continuing, please visit http://www.savetheinternet.com, and if you are a current.com user, please vote up my article.
And to anyone out there who thinks that contacting their reps doesn’t mean shit, I recently learned that when you contact your representative, they tend to go by a ratio of 1:13000. That is they assume that if you care enough to contact them about something that there are 12,999 other voters who care just as much but for whatever reason have not taken the time to make their opinion known.
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[...] yesterday I posted a a story about Time Warner rolling out ‘metered’ internet usage. Today we see that the coordinated attack on Net Neutrality is underway. Via Wired: Comcast will [...]
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