I'd love to be at the pitch meeting at Time Warner, Comcast, or Verizon, where one of the execs says, "Look, we all know controlling the infrastructure is a suckers game, and the real money is in blackmail."
"Right, brilliant thinking Ted. What about profitability?"
"Well, we'd have to do this to a lot of customers to make it worthwhile, since our annual revenues dwarf what most people could pay. I'd say roughly 30% of our customers should be sufficient for a trial period though. But once we get the system down, I'm sure we'll reap economies of scale, and claim a lot of first mover advantages."
"Oh, but is there a risk that some customers might be turned off by the new blackmail feature? Would retention become a problem?"
"Doubtless no. Once they realize any ISP can blackmail them, they'll hardly want to tell any other ISP what they're up to. I have a feeling this will make them customers for life."
"Sounds great Ted. Have you even found any downside risks? I can hardly imagine any."
"Well, if just one of our third of customers tells the police, we'll probably all go to jail and our company will be destroyed by the scandal."
"Is that all?"
"The class action lawsuits, but legal is still working out projections there, so it's probably not a serious consideration."
"Well that's easy Ted, we just need to convince people not to tell the police. What's your plan for that?"
"That's the beauty, sir. Once we're experts at blackmail, we can convince people to do whatever we want just with more blackmail. It would definitely be a core competency at that stage."