David Birch on broadband
Dave Birch argues that widespread broadband access won't necessarily benefit online content providers, based on the early experiences of porn site operators. "Now that their consumers have broadband, it has become possible for them to download the entire contents of naughty websites in a reasonable time and with reasonable convenience. On a typical cable modem or ADSL link, downloading 600Mb of website content and then burning it on to a CD might take three or four hours, but that's no longer a big barrier. Consumers log in, sign up with their credit card, fire up some shareware to hoover up all of the content on the website and rebuild it locally, and then go out to dinner. When they come back, they cancel their subscription."
