At least we can rest assured they'll be reinvesting all that extra cash in their business. Not in building better infrastructure, of course. The major ISPs stopped doing that a long time ago. Now they mostly invest in lobbying their friends in government to more tightly control what you can do on the internet.. or just kick you off altogether.
Also they spend some of their resources dreaming up new onerous fees for you to pay and, of course, fighting net neutrality in the interest of, you know, "free market competition" or whatever.
It'll be interesting, then, to see just how they react to this sort of free market competition.
Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.
Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.
The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.
Won't get very far. The emerging internet belongs to Hollywood and the big telecoms.
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