The End of the Internet

Yesterday, I came across a story on Digg.com. When I read it, the story had a few hundred diggs (a digg is a positive vote, which signifies how popular a story is).

The story now has over 10,000 diggs.

Why such urgency?

Because the Internet itself is on the verge of changing dramatically. In a bad way.

2012: The Year The Internet Ends

From the article:

Every significant Internet provider around the globe is currently in talks with access and content providers to transform the internet into a television-like medium: no more freedom, you pay for a small commercial package of sites you can visit and you’ll have to pay for seperate subscriptions for every site that’s not in the package.

Can you imagine? It goes on to explain a very grim outlook that will naturally and inevitably emerge:

Almost all smaller websites/services will disappear over time and multinationals who are used to using big budgets to brute force their content into every media outlet will finally be able to approach the internet in the same way.

And now today, Time Warner announces a load of garbage, covered on GigaOm and TechCrunch.

[Time Warner Cable] has set up a pricing plan that ranges from $29.95 a month for something I’d call “barely broadband” at 768 kilobits per second with a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Overage fees will be $1 per gigabyte, and customers will be able to monitor their bandwidth consumption via the company’s web site.

This is just terrible. I agree with Michael Arrington–I usually dislike government intervention, but monopolies are the exception. This CANNOT go down.

Another reason I’m voting for Obama.