When the Levee Breaks

Well it might be true that the RIAA thrives on conflict but even they cannot deny that the masses want their media content online. Be it music, movies, software, television, you name it, it’s online. This is just the entertainment business responding to the demands of their customers, namely, you and me! The internet is the most convenient way to find the content you’re looking for, after all it was designed to be that way from the very start. So why are some factions of “Big Entertainment” resisting this change? I’ll tell you why. The big media companies are scared to death, I mean shaking in their expensive designer boots, scared of a level playing field.

Big Media doesn’t want to compete with you and me, and in the past they haven’t had to. It was nearly impossible for the average person to get a show on TV or get an independent film out to the widest possible audience. Not anymore. Sites like YouTube have made it possible for anyone to make a show on their own terms and put it out to the entire planet. So things are changing but lest we forget that the huge multi-national conglomerates that own the media companies also own your internet service provider!

And so, in case you haven’t noticed most internet service providers now impose limits on your monthly bandwidth. The upshot of this is that if you make the internet your primary source of home entertainment it’s going to get more and more expensive. Some service providers offer several plans at various prices, all the plans in reality feature the same upload and download speed. The only thing that really changes is how much you can download and the cheaper the monthly cost the more you pay per gigabyte when you go over your limit. Sometimes these plans are so out of whack that you can find yourself paying more being on the cheapest service that you would be on a service that is several rungs up the service plan ladder! Not only this many service providers have software in place to slow down your connection if they think you are downloading things you shouldn’t be. This software is so heavy handed in it’s application that it causes problems with online gaming and other perfectly legitimate uses of the internet. This process called “throttling” is prevalent in the ISP industry.

So what is all this subterfuge about? It’s about what will be, dare I say what must be! One day in the not so distant future there will be a levee imposed on the internet. It will be a fee that you will pay to your internet service provider as part of your monthly bill. This money will go into a giant pot. Anytime you download a movie, mp3, software or whatever it will be counted. This information will be used to determine what cut of the pot all the content creators will get from everyone downloading their stuff! It’s simple and the right people get paid. The better or should I say the more popular your content, the more money you can make.

In the meantime if you want to avoid bandwidth limits and throttling look to the smaller internet providers. They are less likely to impose these limits on your internet experience.