meep. I am tired. Will pull out a blog idea from my bag of tricks.

*fumbles* [/commercial break] Did any of you watch Barney (the purple dinosaur) when you were younger? Every episode will have this part where barney pulls out his barney bag (a sparkly gym bag, on hindsight) and from this bag will emerge all these crafty things so the kids can do art and craft. I remember wanting a bag like that. [/end commercial break]

So anyway, I'm on the free press mailing list. It's this organisation that advocates, for, well, free press. i.e. freedom of the press or the rights of the underdog to trump media moguls. (>< here. )The HP alliance has talked about it before, I think, back when the Wrocking Against Voldemedia cd came out.

A few days ago, they sent me an email saying:

Congratulations!
Time Warner Cable’s price-gouging scheme came crashing down yesterday.
In a spectacular victory for Free Press and supporters like you, the company buckled under public pressure and abandoned its plan to impose Internet penalties against those who go online for more than e-mail and basic Web surfing.
If they had gotten away with this scam, users of online innovations like Web video and radio would have been forced to pay up to $100 more per month for full broadband service.

It got me thinking. What if they started charging for reading corporate blogs, or playing games, or watching videos? We're already paying for internet through our telecom service providers, additional fees for viewing online media might put people off altogether. Why would I pay an ISP the same rate that I used to pay, for accessing less features? Why would I even bother paying for internet anyway, since what is currently available is so limited and I could probably live without it?

Not sure what "basic web surfing" entails, but I would think that it excludes videos, news blogs, podcasts, or even games, since Time Warner Cable is a (oh! I just found this out) company that offers cable, internet, and phone services. I think it wants to make the additional features of internet like cable, so then people can pay them for what they initially offered for free. As part of their internet services, they're also offering road runner, a service that they claim is faster than broadband. And the road runner website? A a news site complete with weather reports and horoscopes.

Doesn't Time Warner Inc. already own CNN, AOL, Mapquest, TMZ.com and other entertainment and media companies? It's a large slice of the internet pie. It's a large slice of the media pie too, if you consider the impact CNN had on the 2008 elections. Not that I feel that corporations should stop making money [this is impossible] but it would be all too easy to charge for more than "basic services" if they started to make people pay for aol or CNN first. If they decided to charge for these services, it would be making a significant part of the internet not free, at least to users in the US.

{ to be continued tomorrow. }