 PDXPLT join:2003-12-04 Banks, OR | reply to bgraham
It's gonna happen more and more ... Hey,
ISP's see that people are willing to pay per-bit for certain bitstreams. They pay phone companies, or VOIP companies, per-bit for long-distance telephony. They pay cable companies per-bit for video, in the form of "digital cable". So of course alot of them are going to set up these so-called "walled gardens".
Only two things would stop them: competition, or regulation. As others have said, there's little or no broadband competition in most areas. As for regulations, the FCC has issued "voluntary" guidelines against this, but the guidelines have no teeth. With the current let-big-corporations-do-whatever-they-want mindset in D.C., that's not going to change. |