Jeff Jarvis got a taste of the metered Internet in a Munich hotel where he paid 27 euro or roughly $5,000 — actually about $45 but yes, the dollar is that low — for 24 hours of “premium” Internet that wouldn’t let him download YouTube videos or podcasts. Apparently the lower-cost version involved a German man running up and down stairs with packets to type into a dumb-terminal in the basement.
It’s not as if cable and telephone companies care about being resented, but this is sure to make us hate them even more. And it moves in exact opposition to the history of internet usage since the mid-90s. That’s when I say that Tom Evslin, then head of AT&T Worldnet, made the internet explode when he set flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month. Then the peole didn’t care about the ticking clock; they became addicted to the internet; the internet exploded; and we have Tom to thank for that. And since then, whenever we have had more bandwidth, we have found more good reasons to use the internet more and bring more value to it. On the internet, more is more.
The metered internet [BuzzMachine]
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