| Perhaps there is hope Those of us who have had cable TV for years and cable Internet access for (somewhat) less have seen the service degrade and the price skyrocket. ATTBI bills now have the gall to re-bill me THEIR franchise fee as a line item! Yes I realize this fee doesn't come out of the ether, but give me a break! This isn't a new cost of doing business for them and hasn't increased by anywhere near the magnitude of the subscribers' bills.
What is happening mirrors the same thing that's gone on in free-space (radio/television) broadcasting. Fewer and fewer companies hold a greater and greater stranglehold over a growing number of markets. Competition has been minimized almost to the point of nonexistence and we see outfits like Clear Channel growing to a point reminiscent of the old Standard Oil monopoly. These media monopolies are worse because they're powerful propaganda machines, ones that are being used to shape public opinion as we speak.
This is not a partisan issue (Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which enabled many of these evils). Heck, in most important ways I can't tell the difference between the two parties anymore. It IS interesting though that so many people have been programmed to go into a rant in which they spew a large number of knee-jerk insults, calling others things like "liberals" or "commies" and generally suggesting that to disagree with them on even a single point means you support a long list of nasty things they've also been preprogrammed to slur you with.
This of course just demonstrates what I'm talking about.
There seems to be a strong desire on the part of these mega-ISPs to try to turn the Internet into a one-way medium like television, and at best an online catalog so you can order the junk they push on you. This is the real reason they have TOS that discourage operating your own servers or peer-to-peer services... they can't control what you might say!
No, I'm not suggesting that everyone running servers or peer-to-peer nodes are good guys. I'm not advocating stealing music, movies, or software - as a matter of fact I run a very clean operation here in my own home, though I have very little love for the recording industry.
My point is that upload caps are much less about bandwidth hogging than they are about keeping people "barefoot and pregnant."
To get back on-topic I have to say that I love the idea of what these cities want to do. More power to them and I hope they are seen as an example by other municipal operations across the country and the world. I hope they succeed and are able to offer a reasonably priced, decent-quality, and responsive service to their communities. I also hope they succeed in keeping it local. A state or federally run service would be as bad or worse as where we're headed now.
And I will be watching this closely to look for an opportunity to push this concept here at home. I urge others to do the same. |
