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How's that smart?

Simple -- as one of the few ISPs offering a true, uncapped flat-rate option, they've been deluged with "heavy users" -- the kind of Net user who spends almost every hour of every day downloading or uploading data. These are the people who eventually forced other ISPs to drop the open-ended flat-rate option.

By hiking its prices to a (presumably) profitable level, Actrix carves itself a very useful niche in the market.

Although many of its users will bitch loudly (and many already have), there are probably more than a handful who'll just pay the extra money and stay put. After all, they don't have a whole lot of other options to choose from.

So, rather than competing with everyone else, Actrix has created a new market (true-flat rate for a fixed, albeit high, monthly fee) and looks set to hold a fair chunk of it.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) Flat rate?... - Allister Jetstart... - Peter Actrix... - Nigel Cordless Keyboards and... - Shane Have Your Say

Recording Industry Triple-dipping?
Now some more information on the outrageous antics of the recording industry.

This story running on Ananova.com reports that Finland's taxi drivers are now required to pay around NZ$45 per year to the recording industry if they want to have a car-radio in their cabs.

Yeah, that's right -- the recording industry wants two bites of the apple.

Remember that the radio station will have had to stump up a "public performance" fee in order to broadcast the music so the right for people to listen has already been paid for.

What's next I wonder?

Will music CDs start carrying warnings that they may only be listened to by the person who bought them? Will the recording companies start raiding private dinner parties and prosecuting you for allowing friends to listen to your music collection?

It gets even worse. Imagine of a cabbie takes a fare whose own CD collection includes the very tracks he's listening to on the taxi's car-radio. Now the recording industry is triple-dipping.

They've been paid by the radio station, by the cabbie and by the passenger, all for the same piece of music.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the recording industry's demands is the fact that governments around the world seem to have little hesitation in passing laws to support them.

Is there graft and corruption going on behind the scenes? It's hard not to be at least a little suspicious isn't it?

After all, what other industry can you think of which has been able to have its right to charge three times for the same product protected by law?

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