Time Warner's Effort in Halting Technological Advances?

Many of you may have heard about Time Warner's recent decision to start capping Internet bandwidth usage for it's "customers" and charging overage fees for usage beyond the cap.

While I can understand, from a business perspective, why a greedy corporation would do such a thing, besides customer satisfaction, this move will do a lot more than damage their popularity with their customers--they could potentially be responsible for reversing the Information revolution as we know it.

When larger cable companies such as Time Warner create a market to charge for bandwidth usage on their network because of inevitable congestion that exists when stuffing a copper wire, other cable companies will likely hop on this bandwagon to source their dying profits. As customers of these companies are encouraged to use their Internet less, the market for Internet-enabled devices begins to shrink.

When markets begin to shrink, the demand for research and development of new products and technologies begins to run dry. Companies like Apple, will not be able to push our us into a disc-less world where movies will be able to be rented and purchased with instant gratification at the push of the button. We will be stuck in attempting to find the next media that will hold our 100GB ultra high-def movies and interactive features.

While this scenario may seem somewhat unlikely, it really is not when you think about it. If anything, cable companies need to be nice to their customers as the rise of fiber optic enabled Internet/Phone/TV begin to win homeowners hearts.