[TriLUG] OT: URGENT: H.129 to be heard in Thursday's Finance Committee!

Chris Merrill chris at webperformance.com
Mon Mar 14 20:08:40 EDT 2011


On 3/14/2011 6:01 PM, Cristóbal Palmer wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Chris Merrill <chris at webperformance.com> wrote:
>> I dunno, looking at the pricing, it looks very fair to me. It is not a cap,
>> it is tiered pricing. If you use more, you pay more...just like electricity,
>> water, food, gas.  What am I missing?
> 
> Water is a utility and is highly regulated. Steps in the oil/gas chain
> are highly regulated at the state and federal levels. Food production
> and retail are highly regulated at both state and federal levels.
> Internet Service is not highly regulated.

Good thing...'cause regulation isn't going to improve it.  My point is that
the pricing is relatively reasonable.  $10/50G comes to what, about $1 for
5G - $1 for a full DVD.  $1 per movie seems pretty reasonable to me.

The alternative is that the explosion of bandwidth consumption forces more
spending on infrastructure to provide it. Somebody has to pay for that, and
it should be the people using it - those consuming lots of bandwidth.  Why
should the people who aren't using it pay for it?  It seems fair that people
pay for what they use. The artificial "unlimited" pricing devalues the
commodity (in this case bandwidth) causing over-use...and lowering the
availability for the rest of us.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of the bill at hand. I am, however,
in favor of tiered pricing - as are most of the people who aren't in that
top 5% of bandwidth consumers.

-- 
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Chris Merrill                           |  Web Performance, Inc.
chris at webperformance.com                |  http://webperformance.com
919-433-1762                            |  919-845-7601

Web Performance: Website Load Testing Software & Services
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