The big question is where they draw the line. Sure it's fine to charge the top 1% of users an arm and a leg for using 98% of their share of the bandwidth, but what happens when they decide to charge the top 50% of users?
I can just see them deciding that the top 50% are the "heavy users" and the bottom 10% are the light ones.
As long as actually do reduce the charge for low bandwidth users there plan is pretty reasonable. They article says that light users will be charged $23/month, which is pretty darn reasonable for broadband.
I do some part-time computer work with elderly people and a lot of them don't have enough cash to go and spend $50/month on cable. Just as the $5/month limited use dialup accounts are popular with these people, I'm sure that others with little income would stand to gain a lot from this type of pricing structure.
You've got a point, although if you look at how effective the fbi is at stopping people on the current p2p networks, I'd guess that they would be even less effective on this.
For example: All they have to do now is log onto kazaa, gnutella, etc, search for a file, get your ip and they've got you. monitoring p2p transactions in the real world would be much more difficult. First of all, you don't have access to everyone all at once. If you want to find someone who's illegally sharing files you've first got to come within range of them, which means sending an agent out to walk around all day (two if you want to be able to pinpoint the culprit's position).
Basically this is going to be way too cost prohibative for all but the largest offenders (Johnny hacker who had his 1TB movie collection available to everyone walking past his appartment).
The main problem that I see in policing this is that on the 'net you might have a million users to monitor for copyright violations, but you have access to all of them all the time. In the real world there might be only a few hundred thousand users out there, but if you can only see one of them at a time, and only happen to pass by 2 of them in one day things get a lot harder to police.
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acm.cs.umn.edu/~fuzz/MS-Ericsson.jpg
I can just see them deciding that the top 50% are the "heavy users" and the bottom 10% are the light ones.
I do some part-time computer work with elderly people and a lot of them don't have enough cash to go and spend $50/month on cable. Just as the $5/month limited use dialup accounts are popular with these people, I'm sure that others with little income would stand to gain a lot from this type of pricing structure.
For example: All they have to do now is log onto kazaa, gnutella, etc, search for a file, get your ip and they've got you. monitoring p2p transactions in the real world would be much more difficult. First of all, you don't have access to everyone all at once. If you want to find someone who's illegally sharing files you've first got to come within range of them, which means sending an agent out to walk around all day (two if you want to be able to pinpoint the culprit's position).
Basically this is going to be way too cost prohibative for all but the largest offenders (Johnny hacker who had his 1TB movie collection available to everyone walking past his appartment).
The main problem that I see in policing this is that on the 'net you might have a million users to monitor for copyright violations, but you have access to all of them all the time. In the real world there might be only a few hundred thousand users out there, but if you can only see one of them at a time, and only happen to pass by 2 of them in one day things get a lot harder to police.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/19/056214 &mode=thread