When looking for new service I don't just look at the price and connection speed but what each company can offer me as part of the overall experience.
Deals such as this could eventually make choosing that overall experience resemble choosing between AOL and CompuServe. At least they had a "Bring your own access" options so you could subscribe to their overall experience without being forced to use them as your ISP.
You know, if Verizon and Time Warner wanted to create sites that bundle a lot of content in various packages, and charge to access those sites, that would be less of an issue. (Assuming no preferential pricing or quality of service to their own ISP subscribers.) At least companies would not be playing gatekeepers at the network infrastructure level.
