A New Service That's Sure To Benefit Consumers

I heard that the power company is going to start doing Deep Power Inspection on the household power they're delivering. It seems some people have been using electricity to commit crimes, and these "power pirates" are using up all the power that should go to legitimate users.

Thus the power company is taking it upon themselves to police the use of their utility. They're going to install monitors on everyone's feed that will keep an eye on what the power is being used for, and report back. So if someone is running grow-lights the power company can throttle their power, and since grow lights are pretty much only used for illegal things, that's ok.

Also, since the power company makes appliances now and they'll be able to tell when you're using their appliances, or appliances made by their business partners, and they'll be able to give you "premium electricity service" for those outlets, and this will let those appliances work faster and better.

As a further benefit to their customers, since they'll know what electrical devices you have, and when you use them, they'll be able to provide targeted advertising to you on the screens on all of the appliances you bought from them. For instance, if you have a treadmill, and your usage of it declines, they can send ads for diet meals and such to your power-company supplied fridge. This, of course, is not an invasion of privacy.

Sure, there are some kooks out there who argue for so-called "grid neutrality", claiming that you should be able to just pay for however many watts of power you want a month, and it's none of the power company's damn business what you use it for, that if they start policing some uses of their power, then they should become somewhat legally liable for all uses of their power, but that's ridiculous.

Furthermore, these radical, pro-power-pirate fringe groups claim that if the power companies control both the quality and amount of power that go to different appliances, and have a vested interest in keeping you using their appliances, that they will intentionally degrade the performance of other, third-party appliances, and that this will stifle innovation in the marketplace, since any new use of power would have to be approved by the power company, but that's simply not the case.