I, Cringely talks data caps

> That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8. > > That doesn’t sound unreasonable on the face of it. Capping consumption at 20-times the provisioning level doesn’t sound so bad, but I think it sets a dangerous precedent. > > These data caps are actually a trap being set for us by the ISPs. > > Data caps that may make logical sense today make no sense tomorrow, yet once they are in place they’ll tend to stay in place. Great article by I, Cringely.

I’ve been thinking this ever since the talk of data caps started several months ago. Just like with variable pricing on music in the iTunes store, these sorts of pricing changes are never designed to actually help consumers. In the sort term, they look to make things cheaper for us. So most of us fall for it. But over the long run, they are cleverly hidden price hikes.

And the worst part is that none of it is necessary to keep ISPs in business. This is all about increasing profits. Nothing more.

2GB today sounds like a lot. 2GB a year from now might be average monthly use. 2GB ten years from now may very well be average DAILY use. Do you really think the ISPs are going to keep raising the amount of data you get for the same price over time?

Just when the Internet is becoming a necessary utility, companies are setting up the infrastructure to divide us up between those who can afford to pay for the data, and those who can’t. They’re turning something as essential to our future as running water and electricity into something only rich people can afford. And we’re going to suffer greatly as a nation because of it.