I had a first time experience last night that I’m going to be thinking about. We got to Hickory and checked into the Courtyard by Marriott, one of my favorite hotels (you’re going to sleep at any Marriott). We went out for Mexican and drove around downtown (my Dad grew up here), and then back to the hotel for some episodes of The Web Wing. When I went to log on and check e-mail, I had two levels of access to choose from. Standard high speed (300+ somethings — good for surfing, etc.), or the really high speed (1500+ somethings — good for web applications). The Really high speed Internet was $5.95 for 24 hours and the other was free.
I’m using the simply high speed, for free, and it works just fine. I’m getting ready to try Second Life, and we’ll see. It’s a strange economy this information world, and companies are continuing to figure out how to monetize it. This is ok, as long as democracy and our intrensic need to learn are not compromised.
Hmmm! I wonder if that last statement might brew some comments!
“Monetize”? Because they can.
The ibahns, wayports of the world really screw you at hotels for fee-based internet– something a little open competition might torpedo. We’ve had conferences where they wanted $200 per connection per Mac address.
Pay heed to Bryan Alexanders iron law of Hotel Internet Access (http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/04/bryans_iron_law.html) – the fancier ($$$) the hotel, the higher the price of net access and the worse the bandwidth. He finds the best deals (free wireless) and speeds are optimal at lower end hotels. Go figure.
There is always going to be opposing forces. Take for example radar detectors- they keep making them better, and the police keep coming up with better radar (endless loop?) they are making money on illegal activity, so why are we surprised when we see it in other places? Another example is Digital Rights Management- it seems that even before the latest codec is out, there is a crack.
It is going to be extremely difficult to regulate a resource that was originally free (Internet) given the movement in open source. When big software companies can’t make a profit selling software, the only other choice is to control access and bandwith. No one seems to question why we have to register domain names with GoDaddy- who the heck are they, really?
When we shift to the extended classroom (golbal?), who are we going to buy the bandwith from? Whoever it is, they will control education! (Hmmm….EduDaddy?)