Last month, when Time Warner
backed off an
unpopular plan to roll out pay-per-byte billing to four additional cities, it was pretty clear that the company hoped the retreat would be temporary.
Today, CEO Glenn Britt confirmed that the
cable giant continues to favor metered billing. "I still think some notion of, you-use-less-you-pay-less, use-more-you-pay-more, will ultimately be what happens, but we'll see," he said this morning
at a Sanford Bernstein investor conference,
Britt also continued to frame the controversy as a public relations failure. "Clearly we did not handle the public relations very well and had a
bit of a debacle to be honest."
The company said much the same thing last month, when it announced it was delaying the roll-out. "While we continue to believe that consumption based billing
may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process," Britt said at the
time.
It's hard to see what kind of spin doctoring would have made consumers embrace the plan. People tend to know when a company tries to charge them more for less, and public relations
campaigns aren't likely to convince people otherwise.