Curbing Use of the Internet, You Bad Greedy Broadband-Width-Eating-Monster, You

First it was New York State signing into law a sales tax on all internet purchases arriving in New York, no matter where manufactured, where the point of purchase, what state lines the item had to cross. 8+% on every item. Starting this month, June 2008. Affiliate business across the country say they will lose as the cap for having to keep paper for Uncle New York is set by the guys up at Albany at 10k… the little guy in other words gets to mule the New York’s plow blade.

Now carrier companies like Comcast say they want to slow the access rates for big users of the internet, those who do file sharing for instance. Watch movies at hulu. Play games online.

You could get whiplash reading advertisements from gaming companies and Disneyesque ventures and itunes et al, all encouraging, luring, us to see, do, play the latest online… and then turn to be chastised –a little bit like a bad child– for what road hogs we are on the internet hiway. No consideration. And you know the rest of the drill.

It seems a little like the ideal customer in Comcast directors’ minds is a nice Mr Rogers who wears a nice cardigan sweater and lives with his cat in a two story walk up and only picks up his email once a day and goes nighty-night at 9pm.

Some are thinking this whole sudden “put those cookies back” is a bait and switch. AOL opened up huge access to the internet years ago. Now, the cable companies et al, say too many people are using it too much of the time to do too many byte-laden things.

Isn’t that always the trouble with talented and driven people from the get-go? They always use up too much paper, too much paint, read too many books at once. Geez. Now using up too much time. What next? Too many molecules?

Activists in the USA have been incensed over the last week, claiming that bandwidth speeds in the US are dismal, amateur-rigged, and prices charged astronomical in comparison to the sludge that’s delivered; that several Asian countries have speeds hundred times faster, for far less money.

I don’t know. Will Comcast Detention Hall have a bell ring, saying you’ve exceeded your quota, we’re kicking you offline? Suspended, you bad person you? Then the monitor goes black, the chair we’re in turns out to be an ejector seat and we are suddenly find ourself falling through the air toward Planet Dial Up? Or worse, Planet No-Connection-A-tall.

Maybe Comcast should just charge the porn sites. Seems that would generate a lot more money than us pathetic bloggers spending hours seeking, researching interesting things to suborn the– dry as a 15# piece of paper– news. And at the big bucks we get, why, if Comcast took a

percentage of our blogging income, Comcast would get exactly nothing, zero, zip, nada, from most of us.

But, probably they wont be thinking about people who labor through hours on the internet in love and out of a sense of fealty and duty. We all could have done with a medical rider for loss of eyesight over these many years. Not to mention the need for chiropractic.

Here’s the skivvy from the NYT online site: It’s a MUST READ

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic
Saturday June 14,
By BRIAN STELTER

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.
For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of online content — think YouTube — are relying on an open data spigot to make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers and the Internet.

The Internet “is how we deliver our shows,” said Jim Louderback, chief executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it calls a television network on the Web. “If all of a sudden our viewers are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice about downloading or watching our shows.”

Even if the caps are far above the average users’ consumption, their mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone minutes and text messages.

“As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table, people’s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does innovation and trying new applications,” Vint Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist for Google who is often called the “father of the Internet,” said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much — like those who engage in file-sharing — should be forced to slow down.

read more here…it’s a really informative article.