It's a safe bet that a lot of us are online for a good number of hours daily, add that up for a week's worth of time and we're looking at a completely connected society that has become dependent on the internet. We've come to a point where we use it for everything; we watch our TV shows through sites like Hulu, we watch streaming movies and music videos through places like Netflix, Youtube, Flixster, we get our news from both text, audio, and vidcasts, and of course with the world carrying around Mp3 players, we are downloading podcasts and music of all types onto our devices.That's a lot of usage. Can you put that in measurable terms? I certainly can't, but it's a movement that has gained some steam in the past couple of years and could very well be a reality. For water usage a person comes down, reads the water meter and adjusts for billing appropriately. The same goes for electricity use. Both are easily measurable facets of our daily lives.
The question becomes how does one measure internet usage? If companies want to start charging by GB usage (for example), and start us at say 100GB a month, with pricing plans increasing as usage increases, where does that put us as users when all of our data comes from our computer?
I just can't imagine someone coming into my house and using some device attached to my computer in order to figure out my usage for that month. Of if they are able to do something from their locale, how can I be sure that what they said they are charging me for is really my usage for that month. Whose to say that someone has not found a way to get into my wireless service and eat up my usage for their surfing needs?
Cell phone companies tried to do this to us by charging us outlandish rates for phone plans, then dragging us over the coals if we went over our minute usage. What happened? The people spoke, change came, and now most plans are decently priced with unlimited minutes or data usage, etc...I said MOST plans. Nevertheless, cell phone companies are making this progressive change, yet the internet companies like Time Warner, Comcast, ATT, all want to take a regressive step and start nickel and dime'ing us.
Where do you stand? What are your thoughts? If you get a chance, check out the latest episode of Media Junkyard. They carry a pretty humorous conversation on this topic, but in reality they are trying send a wakeup call to the businesses and tell them, "IT WON'T WORK!!!"
The only saving grace in all this is the fact that there will probably be one company that does not make the move, everyone flocks to them, they make money, and the rest give up the notion and everything stabilizes. All this time wasting could be avoided if they just smartened up, did not try to make a buck off a society that is dependent on the internet for community and information, and just let things be.
Sound off with your thoughts!
Photo Credit, Phoney Nickel
2 comments:
Another problem with this development is that there would be a "poverty tax" effect on the marketplace. The users of "free" websites would end up paying more than those who opt to use premium services (think yahoo mail vs. yahoo mail plus) because of the heavy advertising content of those websites that provide their content or services to us at no charge.
Also, advertising is getting more and more intricate (don't you hate dancing robots), so there would be an increase in fees everytime there is an implementation of a new advertising style or method. Imbd already gets sluggish when when their floating, graphic heavy ads pop up, can you imagine having to pay for that inconvenience?
Hosting companies have been using bandwidth metering for years as a way of billing their customers and a as a source of monthly reoccurring revenue. Most hosting companies are ISPs as well.
The article says it won't work, but this is the business model they have been working off of for quite some time.
The great thing about competition, is that you can always go else where to someone that won't do bandwidth metering. The caveat, ISPs are going in the same direction as the cell phone companies, you have to sign a contract or pay out the nose for month to month.
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