Ok, maybe a little bit too dramatic, but this is the beginning of an extremely negative trend for internet users everywhere. Comcast, after being sued for throttling the internet speeds of certain clients has decided to put a monthly 250 Gigabyte cap on internet downloads for all of its users. If you exceed the cap for two months Comcast holds the right to cancel your internet subscription.
Basically, this means that every activity in which you retrieve information from the internet will count towards this 250 Gigabyte cap each month. This includes everything from loading web pages to downloading music from iTunes, to streaming videos from Youtube.
Although 250 Gigabytes is probably more than most people will ever use in a month the real problem I see with this is not going to happen now, but in the future. To begin with, people may not use the internet so much now, but a year or so from now, people's use of the internet will have increased exponentially; just as it has for years since the internet first came about. It will be a lot easier to hit that cap. Furthermore, and perhaps much more worrying, is the fact that companies may begin to start metering internet access, or charging you the more you download from the internet. This would be absolutely catastrophic to every business that depends on people visiting their sites on the internet. It will have a domino effect that ultimately destroys the internet as we know it...
Lets just hope this doesn't happen, but if Comcast doesn't lose money from this decision, then other ISP's will begin to follow this destructive trend. Thats why I am encouraging any who use Comcast internet service to switch to another ISP that doesn't limit your internet usage (i.o. any other service, since there are no others that have put a cap on their usage yet). Personally, I use DSL from ATT, and have been very happy with their service.
Happy surfing everyone!
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