Via Metafilter, a pretty scary-sounding story at tompaine.com: Stealing the Internet. In front of a House Subcommittee, "a coalition that included Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Disney and others. . . spoke of 'tiered' service, where consumers would be charged according to 'gold, silver and bronze' levels of bandwidth use. The days where lawmakers once spoke about eradicating the 'Digital Divide' in America has come full circle. Under the scenario presented by the lobbyists, people on fixed incomes would have to accept a stripped-down Internet, full of personally targeted advertising. Other users could get a price break if they receive bundled content -- news, music, games -- from one telecom or media company. Anybody interested in other 'non-mainstream' news, software or higher-volume usage, could pay for the privilege. The panel's response was warm, suggesting that the industry should work this out with little federal intrusion."
I just about hit the ceiling when I read this, but then I stopped to think: "stripped-down Internet, full of personally targeted advertising" sounds a lot like AOL or certain ISPs' portal sites, and "higher-volume usage" could be as simple as the difference between DSL and 56K dialup. Is this something people should worry about? (Anybody have access to the dish about what actually got said from CQ via their educational institutions that might help to confirm or dismiss the alarm?)
re: Cause for Alarm?
Well, it's already happening to a certain extent. My Dad just received a DSL advertisement for DSL or DSL Lite. Of course the difference is that the offer was for different download and upload speeds, not total bandwidth usage.
And on the one hand, I understand. The telecoms have had a lot of trouble building the infrastructure for high bandwidth Internet access. I'm sure we all remember the number of ISP's that have gone under and can imagine that more will (i.e., is there any doubt that AOL is in trouble?)
On the other hand, I'm more concerned at any attempt at federal regulation regarding the Internet and was happy to hear that "the industry should work this out with little federal intrusion."
How the industry works it out...
...is generally to lobby legislators until they propose favorable bills. I'll be quite surprised if we don't see this show up in legislation in the next year or three. They'll legislate tiered broadband because it's in their financial interest to do so, and it'll be seen as a boon to the struggling telecom industry. Stocks up, jobs potentially up. A winner all around, so long as you aren't Joe DSL subscriber.