cannedmoose wrote: That was not my argument re... naturally anyone using their network for streaming video etc. is not committing a criminal act. However, as we both agree, it's almost impossible for your average home user to hit the limit. The only difference a faster connection would make to me is how quickly I can access material, it wouldn't make me want to go on a download frenzy.
I am not explaing myself very well I guess.
I'll try a 'hypothetical' senario and see if that helps.
Imagine if tomorrow a new form of generating electicity was developed. The new power generating plant is massively expesnsive but once built there is no incremantal cost on the amount generated. Futher imagine that the power companies decided to keep charging users on the basis of incremental cost or on the basis of a 'flat amount' of usage for fixed fee (based say on an amount that 80% of users today would be under).
My problem would be that the potential benefits of this wonderous new technology are not being passed to consumers / end users. That the real potential benefit of this technology is not that it allows people to do what they are already doing today , cheaper but that it allows people to do more things, new things, that are not possible today.
So to me the same is true of digital networks. Its not what we do today, but what we might do tomorrow that holds the key to how much these technologies can and will affect out lives.
I would also like to try another analogy. Imagine back in say 1990, the average user of a PC. You could argue that back then the average user never or hardly ever cam close to using 100% of their processing power. Thus you could argue that if Intel had decided to implement a system of charging for usage of processing power over this level (rahter than agrresively increasing processing power at fixed cost and delviering this benfit direct to users), it would not have had much impact on many people. However I think in this example the opposite is clearly the case. It was the fact that intel deleiverd the benefiots of 'cheaper and cheaper' processing power to end users as quickly as the technology allowed that has led to more and more users doing more and more things with their PC's than they did in 1990.
