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The beautiful thing about the Internet is its simplicity. If you want to go to a Web site, you open your browser and type in the address. If you want to see a picture of a cat, but don’t know a Web site that has one, you just go to a search engine and type in “cat,” and you have 962 million options. However, the simplicity of the Internet doesn’t go much further than that, especially when it comes to companies whose business models are the Internet.

The three largest Internet Service Providers in the country may switch over to a service that includes a cap on how much data can be transferred in a given time (usually one month), called bandwidth limits or consumption-based billing.

This is especially poignant because of the business policies of Lawrence’s local ISP, Sunflower Broadband.

The cheapest service Sunflower provides is a $14.99 plan that has a six gigabyte limit.

What does that mean? The average file size on Youtube is 10 megabytes, meaning you get to watch approximately 600 videos a month as long if they are close to the average size. That’s not a problem. There’s no way I’d wade through 600 music videos, rickrolls and instructional videos in just 30 days, but again it isn’t that simple.

Every single teeny-tiny bit of information transferred gets thrown into your bandwidth total. All those annoying ads, all those Facebook photos, every single letter on every single Web page — all of them go toward your total. And once your total hits 6.01 gigabytes, you get to pay extra for every gigabyte you go over.

Sunflower Broadband is not alone in this practice. They are simply following the best business plan for the short term.

But bandwidth limits are a short-term solution. Sunflower claims to have one of the fastest Internet connections in the country at 21 megabytes per second. This may be true, but being the best in a country known for having horrible Internet speeds (and a ridiculously low growth rate on that speed, somewhere in the realm of 0.4 megabytes per second a year) is the same as being the best athlete on a team that doesn’t make the playoffs.

Who cares? Hell, the average internet speed in Japan is as much as 61 megabytes per second, according to PCWorld.com.

There’s more to the issue than pure dollars and cents, however. If simplicity makes the Internet beautiful, innovation makes it great. From streaming video rentals from Blockbuster and Netflix to phone calls from a computer using Skype, the Internet is changing the way everything is done.

In the end, ISPs are just protecting their interests. They are trying to increase speeds, as well as revenue, and bandwidth limits are the easiest way to do just that.

But if ISPs look on this as a long-term business model, though, the United States will quickly fall behind the rest of the world in online capabilities.

Companies will continue pushing the limits of the internet’s capabilities, and the rest of the developed world has already shown that they are ahead of our curve on infrastructure development.

Before you know it, Europeans will be going to highdef.youtube.com, and we’ll be visiting stoneage.youtube.com.

— <b>Marvin is a Shawnee junior in English.</b>

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