…Americans are to Europeans? My European friends laugh at our “high” gas prices. Now, they have something else to rib me about – the seeming imminence of consumption-based pricing for US web access. Time Warner is starting to test consumption-based pricing in Texas, and Comcast has been threatening to test this for a few months. Again, this is something that’s been happening in Europe. (They’ve always had higher ISP fees, too.)
The euphemism for this practice cracks me up: subscriber traffic management (UK). The Canadians are facing something similar, traffic shaping, which is different but comes down to ISP management of bandwidth.
So, do you think this business model is inevitable in the U.S., or am I just hopelessly pessimistic? And, how will video-driven sites take the news?
Update: Pro-Net Neutrality group SaveTheInternet has some choice words for Time Warner.