The Future of The Internet
- Thread starter Unarmed Gunman
- Start date
I could easily see it coming to that, all it will take is one major carrier to try it, the rest will follow suit.
Plenty have , and they lost business over it.
The market makes the demands, not the companies, if a major internet provider made the choice to do this, many users would promptly leave for a competing company.
Does most of the internet want this? HECK NO , so , i'm willing to bet most companies wouldn't want to see all their customers leave.
Three years ago how many US based airlines charged additional fees for checking your luggage? I don't remember who started it but one claimed it was to offset fuel prices, almost all the rest followed suit. Two domestics don't have fees, Southwest and Jet Blue, which they do use as a point of differentiation but you can go to any major city and take a flight on a wide variety of airlines.
Telco/Internet customers have a higher switching cost than an airline passenger. What if an a la carte provider liek the fictional depiction above was all that was a available, where are those customers going to go? And what if there was an upstart provider that decided to get rid of a la carte pricing as a point of differentiation like Southwest does for baggage, great for the customer until the upstart needs to hit one of the major backbones and they get hit with the same segmented traffic fees that Time Warner pushes directly to their own customers? It's like jumping on that Southwest flight to avoiid the checked bag fee but for the middle of the flight you get switched to a Delta plane and they charge those same checked bag fees, one of two things would happen: you would then have to pony up for the fee or Southwest would charge higher prices to offset the fees and manage it for you, all the while you think that you exerted your influence as a discerning customer but you still ended up paying, you just didn't realize it.
i was just in korea and the hotel wifi was like twice as fast as my home cable which is like the top package they offer. hopefully instead of this shit, high speed internet will just be straight up free for everyone. it's not exactly super expensive to maintain compared to the cost to the consumer.
So what happens when you buy the "Pathfinder" and you click a sponsored result that now gets blocked because the LP is on Amazon.com (because you failed to purchase the "Marketplace" add-on) does the advertiser still pay?
As much as i'd like to be an alarmist over this to help bolster the net neutrality cause i think nickycakes is correct.
Has dial up has gotten more expensive over time? (think AOL 'free 25 hours of internet!' CDs)
Has broad band internet has gotten more expensive over time?
Is high speed internet is reserved for the elite few?
No.
Don't compare the airline industry to the ISP biz. Just isn't the same.
While I mostly agree with your statements, I have to mention that once a technological breakthrough product runs it's course and the industry shakeouts have occurred, the product transforms from a breakthrough to a commodity.
Air travel is a commodity service, and so is internet access. Not to say it's not going to get cheaper and faster for the consumer but the probability of it becoming less and less profitable to run as time passes becomes more likely (as with the airlines) until.... new technologies emerge and the cycle repeats itself.
I don't see how nicky advocated for the ability of providers to tier their services, he likes how Korea provides it as a utility like water or electricity. Maybe Korea is different but most utility providers have higher levels of regulation (even those that have been "deregulated") than private enterprise, due to their importance in societal infrastructure. So I don't really know what you are getting at.
You're confusing infrastructure and capacity availability with the ability to manipulate utilization of that infrastructure and capacity. What good is high speed internet if you're priced out of using the content it delivers? None.
Not totally but they're close in spirit, extremely high barriers to entry make it difficult for new players to gain market share, opportunity (but not necessarily the propensity) for collusion among a few players, high societal adoption making going without it a big change. The similarities may be few but where they are similar is important.
This reminds me of back in the day when I use to do patent searches on CompuServe with my 2400 baud Cardinal Modem. Lulz
I told one of the CompuServe reps that they should send me a $20 bill feeder to install into one of my drive bays because it was taking too much time to "CALL" in to check my CC balances to know which one to use next.
Easier to have a pile of 20's in front of me and just put them in to PAY for each search and refined search.
DAMN!!
Certainly hope this shit does NOT take hold.
This is the first time 20 years that I have looked them up. CompuServe (They still have a Netscape logo in thier drop down ad on their LP. LOL)
I told one of the CompuServe reps that they should send me a $20 bill feeder to install into one of my drive bays because it was taking too much time to "CALL" in to check my CC balances to know which one to use next.
Easier to have a pile of 20's in front of me and just put them in to PAY for each search and refined search.
DAMN!!
Certainly hope this shit does NOT take hold.
This is the first time 20 years that I have looked them up. CompuServe (They still have a Netscape logo in thier drop down ad on their LP. LOL)
Just because i don't have time to type out a big long reply.....
I think yall both made good points.
But i guess what i was saying is that I think that internet access is going more towards a utility and less towards a commodity. And i think will eventually be regulated as such by the FCC when they declare it to be the 'means of commerce' which we are all pushing the internet towards as AMs.
I have more but that is the gist.
I think yall both made good points.
But i guess what i was saying is that I think that internet access is going more towards a utility and less towards a commodity. And i think will eventually be regulated as such by the FCC when they declare it to be the 'means of commerce' which we are all pushing the internet towards as AMs.
I have more but that is the gist.
