CAPS=license to print money
I am soooooo glad that I don't live in a western country anymore. Where I am in Taiwan, I know I've UPLOADED more than ONE TERABYTE in a year, and my ISP hasn't said anything to me about it. I doubt it has anything to due with the fact that I'm a foreigner, as I'm sure they could find someone to contact me in English if they really wanted to, as much as that they really don't care how much bandwidth I use. In their terms of service, I've never seen anything about "usage policies". If I was in almost any western country, my ISP would have screamed bloody murder about my usage, cut off my access within 15 days of seeing this kind of usage, and rape me for over-usage charges.
Most of the ISP's seem to be working out a way of being able to get money for nothing. If one looks at the structure of the internet, the actual cost of sending 1byte or 1,000,000 bytes is the same, in regards to the amount of electricity and maintenance spent, as I doubt routers are made to go into power savings mode when not being used. And how much can maintenace really cost? It's not like routers need to be serviced over X amount of bytes have gone through it, like a car does after it's gone X amount of KM's, and nor do the lines that the bytes go through. Sure, it costs money to buy the equipment, and have people around to keep things running and fix problems, but these are fixed costs.
This does not include the "peering" arrangements made by the "tier 1" backbones, which is the start of this "license to print money" scam. I say it's a scam, because if you look at my explanation above, it really doesn't cost anything to send data from one network to another, other than the fixed costs. I'm sure by now someone is asking "Ya, but how do they make money if they don't charge for the data?". Isn't that what a service contract with a customer gives, which is money to the company who provides the line for a monthly fee?
The ISP's have set themselves up to be the next "vampire bill", meaning that they'll take their "blood money" to provide you your internet, that most people will feel that they can not do without, much like TV cable or telephone/cell phone service. And these "vampires" take as much blood from you as they think they can get without completely killing you. Sure one can decide not to "feed the vampire", but most choose to do so because life would be "too hard" by not feeding the vampire.
- for those of you who think this is too crazy, it's because you are used to being fucked over and over in the ass like this and know of no other way of life. You may as well ask for your monthly air usage bill for breathing right now, because that's where we'll be headed if we as a people keep accepting this corporate greed controlling our lives.