A congressman has vowed to introduce a law banning Internet providers from charging by usage. It follows Time Warner’s announcement that users wanting unlimited downloads will have to pay $150 a month.

Eric Massa says his Broadband Internet Fairness Act would “prohibit unfair tiered price structures.” He argues that firms should not be allowed to exploit local monopolies over broadband service by charging in this way.

According to Massa, Time Warner’s changes – which he says would more than triple the costs for a household wanting unlimited downloads – are also a threat to jobs. He notes that some groups are particularly reliant on heavy downloading, including farmers using GPS equipment to monitor crops and deaf students who communicate via video links.

Meanwhile gamers are also protesting the new pricing scheme. Lara Crigger of Gamers with Jobs notes that her relatively casual gaming use last month, which involved downloading two full-size games and a couple of demos, plus streaming one movie a week, ate up almost 28GB. As 40GB is the largest service available in her area at the moment, that only leaves 12GB for the month for general internet use plus the bandwidth used up by online gaming before she starts paying ‘overage’ charges.

Several commenters on that site also note there’s a flaw in Time Warner’s new charges: for several of the new pricing tiers, some users will find actually works out cheaper to subscribe to a plan with a lower limit and then pay the excess charges than it does to subscribe to a higher limit.

Meanwhile Timothy Carr of media reform group Free Press claims the pricing is Time Warner’s attempt to make it so expensive to view video online that it deters customers from canceling cable TV subscriptions.

(Thanks to reader Ralph for noting the Massa story.)

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Entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 10:54 am under Internet.

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