Pay-per-usage Internet Effects

Just thinking more about Time Warner's tiered billing (see previous post)... If I have to really pay attention to what I'm downloading and viewing on the net, I will do two things:

1) Turn off ads and avoid ad-heavy sites that manage to bypass my adblocker.
I am not paying for advertisers to serve me unsolicited ads. It's exactly like telephone solicitors calling my cellphone and using my minutes. On the other side of that, what does this do to websites out there (like mine) who rely on advertising to pay for the site? If all the services go to this tiered billing, which it seems may be happening, I think at least graphic ads will be a thing of the past. Most adblockers block text ads as well, so what happens there? Webmaster creativity will be a requirement. I'm thinking "product placement"... a link here and there within the content, to advertisers' sites. That would be awful. You'd never want to click a link for fear it's an ad.

2) Limit my viewing of high bandwidth websites.
That's a big one. Your fancy Flash site is not going to be in my bookmarks. Got a lot of graphics and other bandwidth hogs on your page? I'm not going there either. Some websites I've created are designed with bandwidth in mind, for loading speed. Even on those, I have several graphics I might remove, so my readers aren't put off by watching their kbytes tick away. And I'll go to RSS to get news, rather than the website itself.

Ick. I think the web will quickly become a very boring, textual landscape. All in the name of enormous profits for internet service providers.

Congressman Eric Massa of New York, where Rochester is another trial city, brings up some great additional points here. Perhaps his proposed legislation will stop this in its tracks.