Peoria Pundit

Via Jeff Jarvis:

Time Warner is testing throttled — severely throttled — tiered pricing for internet access, putting it at odds with its customers, with the media industry, and with the future of the internet. I’d like to discuss how they could think differently about their business and customers. What if, instead of a gatekeeper, they saw themselves as platforms or technology innovators or catalysts or enablers?

The AP reports (via PaidContent) that TW will charge subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will be charged $29.95 a month for slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap up to $54.90 per month for 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap; going over will cost them $1 per gig. For scale, the AP points out, a standard def movie is about 1.5 gigabytes and a high-definition movie is 6 to 8 gigs.

So Time Warner could end up charging customers more for watching a movie than the service selling the movie, whether that is iTunes or Netflix. I’m sure that’s quite on purpose. It is TW’s FU to the net neutrality debate: If we can’t gouge both ends of the pipe, we’ll doubly gouge the one that is stuck with us.

In another post, someone suggested that the FCC is a unconstitutional government agency. I suggest that as long as we have government protected telecoms like Time Warner being holding franchise rights through entire regions of the nation, there needs to be some agency, somewhere, with the power to say “no.”

I suspect, though, that technology and the free market will provide the solution. Much like cellular phones have given people to power to tell Ma Bell to stuff it, I’m guessing cellular PCMCIA cards might be able to provide the work around. Speed will have to increase and prices will have to drop, both of which WILL happen in a free market.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:44 pm and is filed under On the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.