I've been following stories like this for some time, but they have mostly been in quasi-techie forums...but now that this story has made it to the Sunday's front page of the Old Gray Lady, I might really start sweating bullets.The article is about how ISPs are moving to consider tiered pricing and bandwidth limits. When they plotted out how many gigabytes the average user transfers a month, I confirmed what I already know...this dreadful bootleg habit has me many, many, many standard deviations above the mean...confirming the accusations of deviancy I've heard all my life, I guess.
So while the argument for pay-as-you-use internet is clear on one hand, they also duly note that it's just this creation of artificial scarcity by providers that may have slowed down the initial growth of the internet.
Everyone remembers when AOL had its pricing based on the # of hours you spent online per month and some associate this with stifling the penetration of the internet to all facets of our lives.
Similarly, just as the media companies are trying to encourage people to spend more time transferring information and entertainment online, they are starting to plot out the fences.
I'm sure there'll be some kind of reasonable way to survive, but I did find my toes curling a little bit while reading this one.
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