Why Airlines Want To Make You Suffer

[Commentary] A recent New Yorker explainer on how the airlines have created a miserable experience for passengers so they can build a profitable business based on charging fees for bags, early boarding, and better seats is just like the playbook big broadband companies are using as they make efforts to charge both consumers and the content companies for access to their pipes.

The danger is that when you start creating incentives to cap and track data usage, you also create a reason for the broadband provider to create a crappy experience so people pay to avoid it. So read that article and rage about the airlines, and then turn that rage into something useful by using it to stop the same thing from happening to your broadband Internet. Tell your Congressman how you feel about the Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger and network neutrality.