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Time Warner Wants More

April 10, 2009 on 7:56 pm | In IdBlog, Spin | Add a Comment

I’ve been living happily without television for over 20 years.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy TV, it’s just that life is too short to spend it on the couch waiting for the trickle of information that comes out of that box. I much prefer to search for my info and entertainment on the web. And, in the last few years, that’s become a much richer environment with broadband internet and services like You-Tube, Last.fm and Hulu.

That happy infotopia could vanish if Time Warner’s latest plan goes into effect. Yesterday, Saul Hansell reported in The New York Times that Time Warner wants to charge $150 per month for unlimited internet service. Right now I pay $45 per month to Time Warner for unlimited internet service.

I’d gladly switch to another ISP, except in my part of Brooklyn, and in much of NYC, it’s Time Warner or dial-up. That’s not much of a choice.

In the pre-internet era, when municipalities granted cable companies exclusive rights to regions, they extracted concessions like public-access cable channels in return.

Now that cable companies are de-facto monopolies of internet service, cities and states should get something in return.

Comcast has met the challenge of increased net usage with a cap on bandwidth at 250 GB a month. This seems fair.

Maybe Congress could draft legislation that would enable the FCC to impose a standard bandwidth allowance of 250 gigabytes per user per month. Over that limit, the cable company could charge a fixed scale of fees for increased bandwidth.

This would be a great help to those of us who make our living online, or to those of us who would rather not be subject to the inanities of Fox News, A&E and CNN.

Freepress.net has been quick to set up a Congressional spammer to faclitate citizen feedback on Time Warner’s effort to charge more for less. Use this link to send a message to your representatives about Time Warner’s move to shut off the net. Or sit on the couch and do nothing. All you’ve got to lose is your self-respect — and $105 more per month.