Mashable has an excellent post on how the US may be losing leadership in the digital space. They point to the following developments as signs of bad times ahead:
1. Comcast and others are imposing bandwidth limits on home Internet accounts. This is ultimately a move to increase revenue without improving infrastructure.
2. Canadian universities are dropping their use of US Internet infrastructure because of the high levels of monitoring and surveillance allowed by the so called Patriot Act.
3. Foreign companies and governments are building alternate routing systems so that they can avoid being dependent upon the US and indeed exposing their traffic to US surveillance. And who can blame them?
The Mashable post says we are becoming a backwater. Seems a bit excessive a categorization to me, but it points to how everything is connected. That all decisions have consequences that can be foreseen and not foreseen.
The bandwidth charging stuff is perhaps the only controllable part of the soup, and it seems highly unlikely to change given the ISP's desire for more revenue without major infrastructure investment. And to be fair, they have NOT been able to capitalize on the explosion of web revenue from advertising. Which is what NebuAd was (is?) ultimately about.
Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.
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