A new brief circulated by consumer watchdog Public Knowledge, The Wrong Tool for the Job: Data Caps, Price Discrimination and Bandwidth Pricing, dissects three different methods ISPs have used to gauge and bill consumers for Internet use, and it highlights how data-based pricing “is a move back toward the per-minute strategies of the past.” The paper points out that time was the first means of billing a customer based on how long they wants to stay on the Web, and then speed stepped in to fill time’s old role. Operators’ migration to usage-based billing “is a step backwards,” Public Knowledge posits, because “it reintroduces meter-watching to the Internet experience and forces consumers to become experts on megabytes, gigabytes and dynamic streaming rates.”

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Monday–January 25

Where Does Nonfiction Programming Go from Here?

With the pandemic, a heated presidential election and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement shaping programming choices in 2020, where does content go in 2021 and beyond?

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