On Sundays I offer comments on some of the most interesting information technology stories that I have found on the web that week.  Please feel free to join in the discussion or suggest stories during the week.

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Story #1 — Cnet.com: Sites Can Block The Diggbar, But Is It Worth It?

There is a fight brewing in the online world over who controls advertising revenue and the URL’s that they are tied to.  This past week, Digg.com , implemented a seemingly innocuous automatic URL shortener to its site.  The idea is not new – blog and news URLs are very long so instead of using the actual ones in emails and posts, you employ any number of online database services that store the original URL and give you a short one to use in its place.  TinyURL.com is a good example of one.  The problem, as this story points out is that all web based advertising revenue, marketing, and statistics gathering is based upon URLs and the number of hits that they generate.  The companies that pay for this claim that Digg’s move will not effect their ratings as Digg told them of their plans giving them time to update their algorithms to accurately record the real URL not the shortened Digg supplied one.  Many web professionals are not so sure though and believe that their link counts and hits will decrease.  Personally, I think that Digg, a company that’s entire business is based upon the promotion and ranking of URLs should be very careful in their actions here since their business model relies on happy webaholics plugging third-party content on Dig.  If the fickle online community turns against them Digg will fail.  I really cannot see why they would have done this unless there is an advertising and revenue advantage to them… seems to me that there is an old saying about not "pXXping where you sleep" that is relevant.

Story #2 – ArsTechnica: Time Warner Tries Again, Fails To Justify Caps And Charges

This is another story that bothers me quite a bit.  Time Warner has been recording the amount of bandwidth that its customers use on a monthly basis for some time now.  The reason is that they plan to introduce a tiered cost plan – consumption based billing – that has you pay fees if you go over a set limit.  They are targeting 40GB/month as their entry tier.  Right now, they offer unlimited Internet and this will end that.  For comparison, most other large Internet providers do have a cap, but it is very high – 120GB/mo for AT&T and 250GB/mo for Comcast.  The reason that I don’t like this is that it is really just a poor, anti-competitive attempt to protect their revenue stream in the wake of online movie services like Netflix, iTunes, and Hulu.com.  See a few years back the cable companies were not happy making money on your cable TV bill so they “added” Internet service to their portfolios.  Then, a strange thing – to them – happened, people started to downgrade or cancel their cable TV packages in favor of time-shifted, higher quality, and always-available online movie services.  So what do the cable companies do?  They invent the need for a cap to justify a $1/GB overage charge to boost their billing.  Considering that an hour of HD video is about a GB, you can see how it would be easy to exceed 40GB/mo if you are watching TV or movies at home.  It looks like the transition from a premium service model to a utility-based one is going to be expensive and painful for consumers.  Does anyone not think that twenty years from now you Internet bill will look just like your water bill and not like you cell phone bill looks today?

So I shared my opinions on these thought-provoking stories… what do you think about them?

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 12, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin .