This has been a busy week for broadband providers. First Time Warner announces that they will be rolling out tiered internet access to markets in Texas and New York. Tiers which give extremely low consumption caps (5, 10, 20, and 40GB plans). Then AT&T has decided to completely ignore any concept of Net Neutrality on their wireless data plans. They have done this by blocking Peer To Peer file sharing, blocking competitive online video and audio services, and by charging users excessively for going over their (relatively small) data limits on their plans. Then in Congress, several legislators have spoken out saying they won’t support and/or push Net Neutrality bills. Cable executives must be dancing in the streets right now over that one.
This, in part, may be related to news from cable executives that say that market saturation is the real cause of recent slowdowns in subscriber growth and not the worldwide economic woes nor increased competition from telephone companies. If this is true then they should instead focus on opening markets for free-for-all style competition instead of lobbying to limit the number of cable operators that can serve an area (often forming local monopolies). They should also increase their competitiveness by offering new and creative services, especially those related to music and movies (accessible over their networks and not blocking competition). There are a finite number of consumers on this planet. Eventually you have to reach critical mass where it is simply not possible to have any more subscribers than you already have. Before that happens they should diversify their offerings and find new revenue sources (excluding using ridiculous service limitations to create overage charges for internet usage).
It is unreasonable for any business, or economy for that matter, to expect perpetual growth. There is a finite number of resources on this planet. Resources used to create products and provide necessities for consumers to survive and even thrive. This, of course, limits the number of humans this planet can support and thus the number of customers a business can have. This drive for perpetual economic growth on all scales is part of what is causing this global economic meltdown. The unreasonable expectation that money will continue to grow without end. Instead an expectation of maintaining a stable level of income seems to be a lot more practical for everyone. That or create interstellar space travel to find new life and new civilizations to turn into customers.
Tags: AT&T, cable companies, Consumer Rights, Economics, excess, greed
