Hello,
I'm not sure that the typical consumer would have the patience for a
broken Internet. If average Susan decides to "shop store x" and the
site isn't working properly, her patience will wear thin. If this
happens to multiple sites, It is my opinion that she won't merely be
"trained" into going to the sites approved by the government. She'd
probably just jump ship and scrap the whole notion of the Internet.
Which would mean she'd just call up her provider and disconnect
service. She has better things to do.
The bit about "tiered access" is curious, because it JUST happened to a
client of mine. He has been using DSL in his home for years without
much of any trouble. However in the past month his service has been
offline about half time, which has been extremely frustrating for him.
The problem is that a few weeks ago, it was down for a week and they
said that some tech had "accidentally unplugged 50 lines in his
neighborhood and his was included". It actually took them a week to
"plug it back in". Then after a week of uptime it went down again (for
another week) and the providers' response was "there's water in the
line". The word he received from his provider, which is the company
named in the article, was that he should upgrade his account to "their
business level service to get better service and have trouble-free
Internet". After that phone call, he called his local cable company and
ordered their Internet service. That's a true story.
We'll see what happens I suppose :)
Take care,
Waitman
Waitman Gobble (avail4one@gmail.com)