What is a fair price for Internet service?
Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.
The issue of internet service has been heating up in Canada as the telecoms have started charging even more and setting data caps that have more than a few Canadian internet based content providers annoyed.
Huge Thompson, a writer for The Globe and Mail, decided to investigate the justifications for these price hikes and the reasons for the concept of usage-based billing.
What is a fair price for Internet Service? by Hugh Thompson (The Globe and Mail)
Realize that while this article is focused on Canada, this easily applies to many parts of the world. It doesn’t get into a lot of the tech explanations and yes some of his statements on pricing are a bit generalizing, for example there is a significant cost difference between wireless signal providing and land based cable providing, but the price gouging is still there.
There is a war for the internet going on and I’m sadly not sure if that phrase is a hyperbole or not. On one side was the original intent, a communication network couldn’t be shut down, where information could be quickly and readily shared. On the other side is industry wanting to create a digital distribution system.
Personally, I side with the first group. I want the internet to become a utility. I want it to be something everybody has access to, like electricity and water. I want to be able to run my webpage for people to read, and I want others to be able to post their information to. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, etc. I want these types of sites to continue to available and I want the internet to still be able to spawn ideas such as those.
I don’t want the internet to become the staging ground for media takeover. While I do like the idea of digital movies delivered directly to me, I don’t want to see the distributors of those movies take control of the internet in order to do so. In a way, they’re taking what someone built and others use, and rather than improving on it or making their own better version, they’re attempting to enforce their own will upon it.
I know the situation is more complicated than that, but it is definitely one view to take and while I don’t fully trust governments to do the right thing all the time, I don’t see another tool of the people at our disposal to keep a goal such as a free internet a possibility.
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