Nothing Gold Can Stay

MANIFESTO

I've kind of been hearing this out of the corner of my ear for the past few days:

AT&T Inc., the country's largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data.

"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week.

The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.

AT&T doesn't have any specific plans or fees to announce yet, Coe said.

I suppose something like this could be looked upon as inevitable. I don't think it'll ever affect me because I download next to nothing and never play online games; nevertheless, it's just another way that the ideal of the Internet continues to disappear.