Herein, the latest news on Time Warner's Road Runner rampage for April 8, 2009:
1. Greensboro Mayor Yvonne Johnson is open to discussing recruiting alternative competitors for Time Warner's beleaguered Road Runner internet service, now under major scrutiny for implementing a new metering pricing scheme. Good soundbites from Sue Polinsky also (click the Channel 2 icon below for the story):
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2. Two new sites have popped up in recent days:
Stop TWC (at http://www.stoptwc.info)
And
Drop Time Warner Cable (at http://droptimewarnercable.com)
See their commercial here:
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3. Lawmakers in Washington are getting wise to Time Warner. Online Media Daily reports U.S. Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) is vowing to stop Time Warner from forging ahead with its metering plan and may introduce legislation soon to do just that.OMD:
"This is an incredibly ill-conceived idea and a very repressive step backwards," U.S. Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) said of the cable company's plan. "At the very moment when access to digital information is at the heart of economic recovery, they're going to go for corporate greed."
Massa added that he is considering introducing legislation to rein in the company. "In many markets they are a monopoly and we are going to invoke every tool necessary to ensure they don't proceed with this," he said.
Massa's district includes Rochester -- one of four cities in which Time Warner plans to test the new pay-per-usage billing system. The others are Austin and San Antonio (Texas), and Greensboro, N.C.
Massa also issued a statement Tuesday criticizing Time Warner's plan as "an outrageous, job killing initiative."
4. The new digital divide? News & Record editor John Robinson late yesterday called this fight "a different digital divide." Is he right?
What does it mean that one group is abuzz and another is quiet? It is a different sort of digital divide. Naturally, bloggers would be upset by TW's tiered pricing plan. It socks them in the digital solar plexis. As Allen says, there is fierce discussion on the blogs and in the comments.
Letter writers to the newspaper? (Warning: This is an assumption, an informed assumption but an assumption nonetheless.) Many letter writers are primarily newspaper readers and seek the forum that the printed editorial page provides. They spend time online -- most of the submitted letters come via e-mail -- but they don't live online. They don't tend to be of the generation that watches video online or builds Web sites from home or measure time in gigabytes.
No big deal, you might say. Different audiences. Different ways to express opinion. Personally, I think that Time Warner's pricing plan should interest everyone who is a customer of the business. And that is most of the people around here. (I admit I was surprised by two council members who said they were not customers of Time Warner. Dish users? Rabbit ears? No TV?)
More to come...in the meantime, let's talk about it.
E.C. :)
Posts
3 comments:
Mr. Huey,
Here's a link about the "new" plan from TWC.
http://a.longreply.com/109511
The COO announces how the previous press release was a little premature and here is the new plan they have.
Honestly it makes less sense to me than the first set of plans did. Can you look into it and let us know what it means? To me it looks like I will pay close to $150 for my internet when my current cable bill plus internet is only $120 (Internet is $49). On the bright side it looks like we are getting faster speeds so we can go over the cap quicker.
Thank you
Bruce
I used to watch all episodes of the road runnier when I was a little child.
Nowadays, I have no much free time to spend it watching TV, but always I can, I do it.
Thanks so much for the post, really effective data.
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