We Won't Pay!

This blog has to do with keeping Ning free, no matter what those greedy corporate people who run Ning want to do. In the next three months they will take away our free services. They want to put the Ning sites on a paying basis. We pay enough for our Internet, whether it be DSL or cable, without the companies on the Internet trying to get more money out of us.

Here I change tack, addressing Ning directly. Why don’t you just get your money out of the ISPs the way they do on cable or satellite TV, or sell ad space the way the commercial cable networks do, or like you have done the last several years? It’s grossly unfair to take our free networks away from us. If you wanted to make money from it, you should have charged us from the beginning, like GoDaddy! did. Of course people wouldn’t have bought your product, but that’s the breaks of the commercial game. It’s one of the risks you take when you start a commercial enterprise. You’re acting like the drug pusher who gives away his product until people get hooked, and then you start charging them an arm and a leg for your “service”. It’s mean and grossly unfair. Many of your customers are disabled who live on very limited incomes, and just barely manage to scrape together the $25 per month for DSL service, and the Internet is their only outlet.

I wish we could sue you, Ning, for breach of contract. But I predict what will happen. You try to charge us, and people will vote with their feet, or rather, their fingers. We will walk away, and your only customers will be a bunch of greedy merchants who will blame you for taking their client base away and stop paying for sites or ads.. You will all go broke, and no one will shed a single tear over your demise as a going concern, because we’re shedding our tears now, in anger, because you’re taking our ning away.

Don’t do it, Ning, you will regret it. I was chatting with an old friend of mine, who is a Reagan Republican, about the situation, and he surprised me. I had expected him to take Rosenthal’s side, but he said that Rosenthal made a very poor business decision in taking away the free services while concentrating on the paid services. The free customers are more likely to come over to the premium services if he retains both. This way he’ll lose a lot of his premium customers, and won’t gain the new ones he expects to come over from the free side. Let’s prove my friend right, folks. Boycott the site of anyone who breaks with us, and buys his services, unless Rosenthal decides to change his mind. Boycott both Ning and anyone who buys his services. Go, Ning, go away, because we won’t pay! I was going to have you email me about the time frame in which they’ll commit this travesty, but it turns out that they’re going to be doing it during the next three months. Find out Jason Rosenthal’s address, either snailmail, or email, and pelt him with letters and emails. I do not recommend death threats, as angry as you may justifiably be at him. Just state how evil he’s being for doing this. When you find either his email, or his snailmail addy, let me know in comments on this blog. I wanna write him too...