The End of the Internet

June 18th, 2008

Sometime around 1994 when the Internet arrived in the Dozier home in the form of America Online we had a blazing 2400 baud modem and were limited to 10 free hours a month. Imagine that. 10 hours a month! I’m online that much everyday now it seems.

Now Time Warner has introduced the idea of Internet Metering which would charge users based on much bandwidth they consume in a month.

From the article:

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a 20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from $30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with higher caps come with faster service.

This tiered pricing model won’t effect users who just check email and stock quotes but for the growing majority of Internet users this is a huge blow. With the convergence of Internet/TV/Video/Music there is no way a bandwidth cap will provide an adequate service level. My new Roku Netflix Player can consume up to 5GB per movie. That would put me into the second tier in under two hours!

Imagine all the things the Internet can be used for that would classify someone as a “bandwidth hog”. Hulu, iTunes, XBox, BitTorrent, Sirius Online, Skype, Vonage, Videoconferencing, and more. Plus applications are moving from the desktop to the online space so more and more people are spending more time connected. Eventually (nearly) all business will be conducted online.

I’m not some hippie but I do believe the Internet should be free for everyone. I believe that someday this will be reality. Every device will have an IP address. From our homes to our cars to our coffee makers. Capping Internet usage is doomed to failure and the executives that dreamed up this scheme are clueless.

The NYTimes article cites AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner as planning on implementing these metering policies. I have Charter Cable which is already the worst company on the planet. I think my head might explode if they decided to go this route. I’m upset enough about the concept of throttling my connection speed and now this. Going back to the AOL pricing models of the early nineties is not an innovative new idea. It’s a giant step backward.