Time Warner is looking to rape its customers for money for internet usage. According to a company spokesperson, they will be charging customers based on how much data they download starting later this year. It will be a tiered setup based on how much bandwidth you use per month. It will start as a trial run in Beaumont, Texas, after which the company will decide how and when to roll the program out nationwide.

Personally, I find this to be very shitty. With everything going the way of the download, bandwidth usage is on an exponential rise across the board. With Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon all offering movie rental downloads (and some in HD), this will only drive bandwidth needs further for the general public. Online media, from music to movies to games, has grown immensely in the past decade and will only continue to grow at a very fast pace. Time Warner looks to be exploiting that and trying to make a buck on Joe Customer.

They haven’t announced what the bandwidth tiers will be, but I’m expecting the one that falls in line with current pricing won’t be that big. For those of us who game online a lot, download demos and trailers daily and weekly, and rent HD movies online, we can probably expect to see a modest increase in our internet bills in the coming year or so. It’s a pity, really. Other countries see 100Mbps unlimited connections for much less than what we pay for 5-10Mbps.

[via Wired]