The Enemy of My (Current) Enemy is My Friend

Much ado has been made over the proposed bandwidth caps to be put in trial by Time Warner Cable. It is almost a shot heard round the world, as it has been put into the press releases of many publications, all around the globe.

In ITWire, an online publication from Australia, the case was made that other parts of the world have had to deal with metered usage, but then also makes it clear that these places have never known a time when usage was not metered. This is a good point, as imposed constraints are always more difficult when no restraint has ever been used.

While everyone seems to be talking about this capping, no one has seen how it can change the landscape of things here in America. One time foes just may join together to defeat the nasty forces of evil that would limit the free flow of data.

Think about it for a minute… The list could be very long. Apple and its  music download service would be first on the list, and not just because we tend to start with the A’s. It’s only a hop and skip to the television networks, that wish to have extra revenues with downloaded content. When limits on downloading start to appear, the customer base is going to become very selective, and thoughts of downloading gigabytes of material that becomes useless after 72 hours doesn’t sound like such a good idea.

Let us face it, every big company that has content to distribute becomes an enemy of caps, and a friend of the consumer.  A strange turn of events, no?

In the mean time, the many e-mails, voicemail messages, and hard copy letters to Time Warner that should be sent will serve to make that company think twice about its ‘little experiment’.

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[tags] Time Warner Cable, ITWire, download limits, metered usage, content providers, American’s unlimited usage [/tags]