Internet Activists Claim ISPs Including Bell Canada And Telus Plan On Creating Subscription Based Access To The Internet
A group calling itself iPower who has as part of its membership Tania Devereaux whom you might recall is a very “provocative” net neutrality activist, has posted a YouTube video claiming to have proof that by 2012, most of the worlds ISP’s are planning to move to a TV-like subscription model which would only offer access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. The problem with this model is that these ‘other’ sites would then lose all the exposure they get from people who casually surf. Since many of them rely on advertising to stay alive, they would eventually shut down.
It gets worse. This group claims to also have confirmation from Telus and Bell Canada that their claims are not only true, but could happen even sooner. Perhaps by 2010.
If this is true, the Internet is dead. Pure and simple. This group wants you to join them to fight this. But before I sign up for anything, I’d love to have third party confirmation of this as it sounds just a bit over the top to me. Although I will admit that anything is possible given the stupidity of some ISP’s (**Cough**, Bell, **Cough**, Comcast, **Cough**).
So that you can make up your own minds, click here for a link to the original article and you can watch the video below.
October 15, 2008 at 8:56 pm
This looks like pure cr*p to me. First, that “Dylan Pattyn” from Time Magazine doesn’t even exists, his name is nowhere to be found on the Time’s website nor any article written by him. Second, just take a quick look at the other videos made by this group, with titles like “youtube will be shut down”, it looks like a bunch of attention whores to me…
my 2 cents