That was the case in the UK for years. Many broadband customers were subject to a "fair usage" clause in contracts with their ISPs, with surcharges for going over some arbitrarily small amount.
The death of Net Neautrality and the Raping of the American Consumer
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Holycannoli
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Well Comcast currently has a 250 GB/month limit which I think is nearly impossible to go over, but I fully expect to see much lower limits in the near future coupled with surcharges or even entirely different plans for users who want to do some of the most popular things like play MMOs or watch videos, and if you don't pay the surcharges or buy the new plans you will be limited in time or usage.
Let's just see how the ISP consumers react.
ParkCungHee
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What abou regions that have limited or single service providers?
Do such places exist? Here (UK) if you can get a telephone line in you can choose from a wide host of ADSL provider, and I allways assumed the US would be well ahead of us.
ParkCungHee
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That's because the UK is a much more compact area. You are never far (by American Standards) from a major city in the UK. Obviously, this is not a problem for cities, but many rural areas have either only one ISP in the region, or only two, maybe three.
aimeeandbeatles
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I do know someone from Texas and someone from California who can only get dial-up in their areas. Where I live, I think there's only about two ISPs.
Yes - now I'm in the US, I've not yet got close to Comcast's limit. On the other hand, I'm not a Torrent Whore, though I do do a lot of work online in Virtual Worlds and we occasionally stream a movie. Comcast state, "250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis." However it's only equivalent to a constant use of 5% of the bandwidth they provide, so their statement is debatable.
As you say, we can only wait and see.
Verizon has always been great to us, then again we've used their mobile service for a decade now so they have good reason to treat us well (it's also great leverage when talking to people over the phone, no one wants to lose a longterm subscriber)
both Texas and California have very rural areas
GoodGame
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Probably that's true. Like you mean they would drag their feet about letting you de-subscribe? AOL/COMPUSERVE and all that used to be big money in the day of the dial-up modems, so I can believe it. Just like P4 25mhz used to be "FAST".
Tacitusitis
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It hardly matters because even without corporations and government co-plotting to restrict and control the unruly Internet, the internet has already become more consolidated and centralized.
*We have gone in 10 years from having multiple competing search engines to one behemoth.
*The blogs have gone from being a decentralized wild west to a situation where only a few voices on a few sites matter.
*Increasingly, political opinion on the Internet is crafted and influenced by the same voices that dominate other media. For example, TV-news opinionmakers and newspaper columnists now also dominate the Internet conversation.
*Corporate websites, especially those associated with old media, increasingly clog the Alexa Top 500, replacing individual start-up websites.
*Truly independent, start-up voices only appear on sites curated and managed by corporations like Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook.
There are only four Internet institutions today that would have been welcome additions to the Internet of 1999:
1. Wiki family of sites (wikipedia, wikimedia, wikileaks)
2. Youtube
3. Digg/Reddit.
4. Blogs.
Everything else is pretty much garbage. Nobody asked for www.adidas.com
*We have gone in 10 years from having multiple competing search engines to one behemoth.
*The blogs have gone from being a decentralized wild west to a situation where only a few voices on a few sites matter.
*Increasingly, political opinion on the Internet is crafted and influenced by the same voices that dominate other media. For example, TV-news opinionmakers and newspaper columnists now also dominate the Internet conversation.
*Corporate websites, especially those associated with old media, increasingly clog the Alexa Top 500, replacing individual start-up websites.
*Truly independent, start-up voices only appear on sites curated and managed by corporations like Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook.
There are only four Internet institutions today that would have been welcome additions to the Internet of 1999:
1. Wiki family of sites (wikipedia, wikimedia, wikileaks)
2. Youtube
3. Digg/Reddit.
4. Blogs.
Everything else is pretty much garbage. Nobody asked for www.adidas.com
wikis existed before 1999
digg and reddit are both diseases that need to be purged
blags are crimes against humanity
so yeah, youtube
Tacitusitis
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except youtube is a pile of feces too, ergo, nothing is welcome
youtube has at least some good stuff to balance out the crap
aimeeandbeatles
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And then half the good stuff is taken down because its copyrighted. So that just leaves crap like guys getting hit in the crotch with a football.
aimeeandbeatles
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And is only available in the U.S. Sorry, but I like my Canadian healthcare.
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