Looks like Google ripped off the idea from Carnegie-Mellon's attempts to help the blind use the web. http://www.espgame.org/

Blackbird, that'd be a great idea if people who get banned move to another free ISP.

The thing is, let me know exactly which ISP that will be. Furthermore, am I going to be able to afford it? I got AT&T because I was able to pay 25 dollars less than I would've to comcast. I can't afford to switch to comcast and i wouldn't really want to switch to comcast either, based on a year of service with them which was refunded through my work.

and. that's about it, for my choices. verizon doesn't service my neighborhood and i'd rather puke on their lines than get any kind of high-speed service from them . . .

talking about freedom and setting up new ISPs is great, but i'm not quite sure that's going to be a feasible alternative for too many people.

i have wide feet AND tall feet. i want a pair. this is some weird shit -- i don't think most human beings of any race or ethnicity have feet that fit correctly into lots of shoes. why didn't nike measure a random demographic of people's feet and redesign a shoe and label it as the REAL PEOPLE SHOE.

bah.

Why, thank you epp_b :)

I want to reiterate what a lot of people have mentioned, which is that there's an illusion of choice of ISPs going on here. Most areas of the country have a choice between one or two (sometimes three if they're very lucky!) providers and that's really no choice at all in the end.

The other point I want to mention that no one has brought up is that there's a lot of strong economic/class prejudice going on here. Of the people in the United States who have internet access today, who's actually going to spring for the third tier? The upper-middle class and the wealthy. And geeks desperate enough to not eat so as to have unrestricted access. And the people who are going to be stuck using the first tier are going to be the poor or "unwealthy" and/or those who are not particularly technologically literate.

And of course, the poor outnumber the wealthy enormously, but consider which companies/sites were going to be available for the lowest pay level in the ad mock-up? The mainstream news. AOL. Nothing with user-added content. Which locks the underprivileged out of the political discussion even further.

I have seen some absolutely brilliant documentaries on youtube from people in inner cities working against police brutality or lack of funding for public school. Or not even documentaries, just footage of protests. If the poor are knocked out of participatory sites, they lose the ability to network with each other across the countries and to share their story with the country as a whole. We'll all lose when that happens.

That said, I agree that this could be an easy-ish problem to surmount if one provider refuses to tier their service. My concern is what is going to happen if this turns into a law that requires companies to tier their service in some sneaky way (because of corporate lobbyists that want to lock out that exact rogue company offering untiered service that we're all counting on) rather than a law that simply says that tiering can occur.

wow, that's a few miles from where i live. i shop at that fairlane green plaza all the time. i guess metro-detroit is keeping handcrafts "alive" . . .