About a month ago, the video rental and streaming subscription service Netflix announced that it was nearly doubling its charges for its most popular subscription plan from $7.99 a month to $15.98. Upon hearing this news, we all went ballistic. I certainly did. I’ve been a loyal customer for years, and now they want to raise my rates simply because they can? Well, screw you, Netflix! How about I just cancel my membership altogether? Suck on that! This was my initial reaction. Of course with time I learned that the plan wasn’t really changing. I could keep getting the one disc at a time for the same price, or for the same price I could simply go without discs and have unlimited streaming of movies. I just had to pay more if I wanted to keep both. And I never actually signed up for both—I just got the free streaming when they added it for no additional price and soon found myself using it more than the discs I get in the mail. So really, they’ve been giving us something for nothing for a while, and now they just want to start charging for the extra stuff. What I find interesting here is not the story of Netflix or iTunes or the New York Times, or any other Internet content provider that suddenly decides it needs to charge more for its material. What is interesting is how it feels like such a violation to us as consumers—a betrayal of charging more for our basic content consumption necessities. Yes, necessities. Because with most forms of entertainment today, especially entertainment that is regularly fed to us in our homes or on our mobile devices, things have evolved from being exciting frills to our lives to basic...