Hard to Accept the Beginning of the End

You will find people that use the term The Internet as a pejorative. Not me. It has been many things to me and only a handful of them being bad. I have met people I am honored to know and call friends. I have had access to culture, information and resources I would need to be hooked up to a university to access.

We, millions of people made it grow, flow and made businesses, connections, friends and dreams no longer deferred.

Money was redistributed to new paths and people and not all of them were major corporations. New technologies disrupted the old; organically. Unrestricted competition, I was told, was good.

We now have AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Sprint. They are not waiting for any FCC decision. 

It is all going to end. It won't be like it was.

I received a change of access terms letter from an ISPs. Not unexpected. Some of my friends have been getting them. The communication goes something like this:

• Wireless resources are not infinite (They are in Lithuania, Japan and Singapore)
• ISP wants to be fair to all of their users
• Network management is required to protect users from the evil doings of spammers and maleware agents
• Therefore, we will monitor, measure and throttle your use of the service that you pay cash money for if we think that you (I) are using too much of it.
• They figure I should only need to do 5GB per month. 

I can do 12GB easy. I watch online classes from Lynda.com and take online classes from my local college. I watch YouTube tutorial videos. I upload videos that I record and share with other people. I'm not a gamer (there is nothing wrong with it; I just don't like virtually shooting people.)

I'm just me and I will soon be penalized for just being me.




I blog. I Twitter. I even Facebook and Google+   I also create and that act of creation is going to get my paid for bandwidth azz slowed down.


I'll have to make decisions about paying more for ISP access or not accessing certain web and content heavy producers. I'll have to give up watching Lee Marvin beat the crap out of some bad guy on M Squad.

(What? It was therapeutic.)

Other people will decide to watch the Hollywood produced crap and not take a chance on independent produced content.


People who just started to get the hang of their public voices will now be shut out. I'm going to miss the hell out of Black Twitter. I might have to let go of the growing Asian discussions on Twitter as well.

So what was really an imperfect but lively public discourse will now be returned to the moneyed.  The distorter"if I don't see or hear you you don't really exist" people. They will drain the color from the Internet and return it to a more bleached existence. For more money.

Google isn't going to be a savior in this because they haven't rolled out their Internet in more than two or three communities. There is no bum rush to get new infrastructures built with alternative delivery devices.

Fiber? Anybody got optical fiber?

There are U.S. cities that have signed contracts with the above providers not to allow another service in the area. Those contract were with the cable part of their corporations but they have bought up many of the former ISPs.

You see where I'm heading with this, right?

We look like prime time chumps to the rest of the world when U.S. Internet access is compared to South Korea. Those folks get 300Mpbs on mobile devices for chump change while ISPs here are charging $100 a month for desktop 10 to 30Mpbs and think they are doing you a favor.

For a limited time only.

I'm still in morning mode. I'm not going to get over it soon.