Pay Per Use Internet Coming Soon…Thanks to Streaming??

Okay, while I’ll admit the thought of being able to download the latest movies and watch them, in your home, any time of the day or night thanks to stuff like Netflix and Blockbuster, and TV shows thanks to Hulu, plus any of a dozen less legally clear alternatives, is a massive slice of fried awesome, it’s not a huge surprise that the internet service providers don’t agree.

See, if people can just get whatever they want from the internet, well, then people are basically paying one price for all their entertainment needs.  Suddenly, media companies take a nosedive and the ISPs are left running a massively backlogged information superhighway.  So sensing their opportunity to take THEIR pound of flesh, most of the big providers are already engaged in proactive bitching and moaning about how hard it is to keep all this infrastructure up and running and why, in order to survive, they MUST start gouging their customers by requiring them to pay based on their usage.

You think I’m being funny there, but I’m not.  Check this out:

So the ISPs are eyeing metered usage as a new tactic. Time Warner got as far as running an experiment in Texas and was considering expanding it to other cities until it was beaten back by consumer advocates and Congress, where a bill banning metered usage was introduced. But AT&T has implemented usage-based pricing in Texas and Nevada, Verizon is threatening to do the same, and Comcast has imposed a usage cap.

So can we continue to get all we can use internet?  Or will we soon be facing massive price hikes for literally every second spent online?  Only time will tell.