the Fresh!

[Update] Time Warner has agreed to curb their plans to cap internet usage, for the time being.

“It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing,” said Time Warner Cable chief executive Glenn Britt. “As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met.”

Unfortunately, Time Warner is being a bit disingenuous, with statements like “until further consultation with our customers”. In other words, they’re waiting until they can find a better way to convince us that it’s the best way. At least we get a “gracious” reprieve while we go back to “school” and “learn” what fair internet is all about.

I also want to give a big congratulations to Free Press, Save The Internet.com, and Stop The Cap.com, as well as many others, for organizing the uprising which caused Time Warner to back down.

But more importantly, the thanks belongs to you, the internet user, who along with 16,000 others, sent letters to Congress in the span of few short days to express our collective outrage. Our internet is only our internet if we fight to keep it ours.

---

Here’s an excerpt from a letter I just wrote to my congressman. This represents my feelings on Time Warner’s recent announcement that they will being piloting/testing a program that will cap bandwidth usage of cable customers in several metro areas, including where I live (Austin, TX).

My protest is that I will be switching from their internet service, soon, if they do not recant. I will not participate in their desperate grabs at survival after years of money-hungry, poor mismanagement. They are a monopoly in all ways (except in technical legal terms), and this is what they do when they go unchecked. Watch out, America. This is only the beginning of bad things to come. Unless we stand up and fight. Contact your congressman and do the same, even if you aren’t in one of the targetted areas yet. Otherwise, you will probably be next on the hit list.

It is unbelievable to me that Time Warner (or any other provider) is being allowed to do this.

Firstly, they basically have a de-facto monopoly because they are the only ones with cable lines to almost all major metropolitan areas around here (COX being the exception in some of the suburbs). Lots of other cable “providers” (like Grande, for instance) are out there, but they all lease cable bandwidth from TW or COX. This means that if TW starts doing this, when their contracts are up with those re-sellers, there’s a much higher chance that those companies will have to follow suit. So the evenutal outcome is that TW is going to use their “monopoly” status to force us all into this, or to other providers.

And not only is it unfair and monopolistic what they are doing, but the way in which they are doing it is sheer madness. The bandwidth caps they have chosen are so incredibly low it just simply boggles the mind.

The medium cap (that is, the cap which would keep most cable bills the same for most consumers) would allow an average download usage that is *only* 2/3 the normal usage you get from having a 56k modem connected 24/7! That’s right, TW is moving cable bandwidth usage back to the days of old-school modem usage! It’s insanity, in the name of money hungry, and poorly managed, business.

I know most of the media is focusing on the fact that this is primarily aimed at curbing internet video downloading so they can stop loosing cable/advertising dollars. But, they will affect lots of other legitimate bandwidth usage in the process.

For instance, I routinely buy software, legally, over the internet, and choose to download that software to save on costs and the environment. These programs can range from the hundreds of megabytes to the couple of gigabyte range.

This means that quite realistically, I could exceed a “normal” bandwidth cap after downloading only 1 or 2 legally purchased pieces of software in a month, and end up paying excessive overage fees for otherwise normal web surfing and checking email.

And this doesn’t even get into the fact that I do freelance side web business work from home, or telecommute to my real job from home. In both cases, I do a lot of file transferring (again, legally) of images, web code, etc. I can’t even imagine having to tell my boss that I couldn’t work on some emergency code fix for our software because I didn’t have any bandwidth left at home.

Cell phone providers somehow get away with limiting minutes, and people have those types of issues from time to time, but it’d be unheard of in this day and age for the same to be true of home internet usage.

I strongly urge you to fight this and not allow TW to go down this path. We have to send a signal that the ISP’s don’t own the internet, and they can’t act like a school bully in the lunch line and force us to “pay up” just to get in line with all the other kids. It’s been unfair and unacceptable behavior in every other area of life, we can’t let this one slide or they’ll walk all over us. Seriously.

As for me, if it doesn’t change, and soon, I’ll be changing to another type of internet provider, like DSL from the phone company, to avoid and to protest such behavior. I simply will not sit by and let them take more of my hard earned money for less service.

You should all be writing letters of a similar nature to your congressman. You should be blogging about it. You should be twitter’ing about it. You should be talking about it to friends, family, and coworkers.

Want to take action? Use this tool from FreePress.net to make your voice heard.