So the discussion on the recent Tek about Time Warner Cable's plan to introduce data caps for your home internet access got me thinking... There must be more to these actions than the stupidity/daft-ness/greed of TWC to suck more money from a near captive consumer base. I will say that, A) this is merely speculation and I have no evidence nor do I claim these to be fact; 2) this does start to dip into some conspiracy theory-type stuff, take with recommended grain-o-salt.
- Data caps are trying to be used to restrict/limit the public's access to the internet. It's like the powers that be (ISP's, governments, 'them') are JUST NOW realizing the power of a free and open internet as to the spread of information and communication. Think something like Nixon's reasoning for criminalizing marijuana: we don't like hippies, hippies smoke weed, make weed illegal, arrest the hippies. Except in this case it's, we don't like 'digital dissidents' (anyone who is using the internet to promote/advance any ideology outside of the norm), digital dissidents use a lot of interwebs, we can't make interwebs illegal, let's limit it. In a very round-about way, data caps are kind of like censorship; especially when you consider Wendell's maths on the data per day and such.
- Less data means easier job for the NSA. If the majority of people are only using 30 GB/month, that's a whole lot less data that needs to be looked through.
Thoughts? Have I looked way too deep into this? Either way, data caps on home internet would be terrible. The NPR Science Friday this week discussed the sad state of high speed internet access in America. Shouldn't ISP's be more concerned with leading the world in high speed internet (this is 'murica dammit) than capping data use? When I was forced to a data cap on my wireless plan, I begrudgingly accepted it because at least I was also getting 4G LTE service with it. There was some small incentive to move to the data cap plan..this is just because TWC are dicks.