You know, I can understand billing by usage in a lot of things: Gas consumption, Electricity Consumption, Water Usage, or even Time Spent Doing Something. What throws me off when Big Telco/Cable wants to charge based on Bits/MBs/GBs.
Do they not see that bits are not a consumption product? If I were to use 50 GB over a period of a month, nothing is used up! This kind of crap needs to be looked at in a different light.
For Example:
Look at the amount of bandwidth that an ISP has much like a 6 lane highway and the amount of GBs per month used by a consumer much like the miles they drive on said highway in a month.. The more people using that highway at any specific time will cause congestion. Reducing the miles driven per month by charging excess fees or throttling them does not take care of the underlying issue that the highway simply isn't large enough to handle the volume. People will still drive in mass during peak hours, which causes the capacity issues.
Now in this situation, I could understand if telcos simply were not profitable, however to claim that it is an problem of capacity is fundamentally wrong. In addition, many of these companies have interests in other things contrary to what the Internet provides, for example: Pay-per-view/Video On-Demand vs Netflix, or Voice minutes/SMS messages vs Skype.
This is the rot at the core of one of the greatest man-made inventions. Throttling, Deep packet inspection, and overall violations of Net Neutrality can destroy everything that has made these last 10-15 years so great.
Please take a moment and see what is going on in our digital playground and speak out against it.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/19/the-free-ride-is-over-for-streaming-video/
https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality
TechCrunch | The Free Ride Is Over For Streaming Video
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