Imagine the following scenario: you go to your kitchen to pour yourself a glass of water only to find that no water comes forth from the tap. Looking in the cabinet underneath the sink reveals a small computer display that reveals the following: you have reached your monthly quota of drinking water for the month and so you are no longer permitted to pour more water until the beginning of the following month.
It is entirely true that Internet connectivity cannot and should not be compared to drinking water, as people lived without internet access for many years and could live without it, however it does seem to contradict the notion of internet access as a human right to force an entire nation onto a metered plan that would effectively go from charging a reasonable price for unlimited access to increasingly absurd prices for even standard access.
“Extensive web surfing, sharing music, video streaming, downloading and playing games, online shopping and email,” could put users over the 25GB cap, TekSavvy warns. Also, watch out “power users that use multiple computers, smartphones, and game consoles at the same time.”
It is very true that as recently as only a decade ago, many people did not have wide access to internet services and the net was not as wide and far reaching as it is today. The people who did have it for the most part did not need to have quite so many gigabytes of data flowing to them every month because there weren’t such excellent web sites with streaming video content or the ability to purchase movies or even rent television shows, nor were there so many options for buying software directly from the publisher without getting a physical copy.
The fact is that internet providers that put such harsh caps on internet access are living in 1995 and thinking that all of our many internet needs can fit easily in a small amount of bandwidth because, after all, what is there to do online besides checking your e-mail and looking at a few Web 1.0 pages? In their minds, anyone who is using more than the allotted space and requests, nay, demands an unlimited sort of access to the internet must be pirating music, television shows, and movies and stealing money from the multimillionaires that snort cocaine along the Hollywood Boulevard.
The reality is closer to us being just ordinary people who want to get the downloadable content we want for our games (sometimes coming to nearly a gigabyte at a time) and watch our Hulu if and when we would like to do so. Killing our ability to get online through metered internet access is just a slap to the face and we as paying customers cannot get behind it — but will we have an option?