Metering the internet: it’s not just the size

Lately Comcast and Time Warner have been considering charging users extra if they go over a set limit.

Here is why I think this is a very bad move for consumers, these ISPs and the progress of the functionality on the internet:

Last week, I’ve been using the internet in a location where there is a 4GB monthly limit. When I am in New York on my cable connection, I do not even pay attention to whether the website I am on is using Ajax to pull some data in the background or if it is refreshing its content every 2 minutes, or if the website I am about to go to has lots of heavy images or auto-start videos on it.
But here, using the internet has become a mental sport of pausing before every click and fighting with the websites that refresh their content automatically, constantly. I do not get into the flow of the applications that I am using, instead I am always thinking ‘how many bytes was that’.

This is bad news for the SaaS industry. If users have the option to use Photoshop locally, they will opt to do so instead of metering up a megabyte everytime they edit their photo.

This is bad news for (social) media. Suddenly all these auto-start videos and your friend’s 1088 photos from beautiful Faroe Islands will not be easy clicks.

This is bad news for advertisers, as even Google now is considering pushing display ads and youtube is considering video-ads. Where else do the ads cost you money to see?

As related to Unype, this is bad news for all virtual worlds and Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Everytime you move, you are pulling down a whole new set of images/models.

The worst part is, all this pausing before clicking makes for a miserable internet experience and with all the existing friction out there already for customer acquisition, you don’t want another extra thick layer of ‘how much data will squibloo pull down when I go there’.

This is bad news for these ISPs as well. A lot of customers will definitely switch over to fiber or DSL even if the limits are very high (Comcast thinking 250GB and Bend Communications already applying 100GBs). It’s not the size of the allowance in this case, rather the complete mind-shift that destroys the joys of hours of clicking-through to find the end of the internet.