The cable companies AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are cracking down on us for using the Internet. Time Warner has begun to monitor Internet use in a Texas town in an effort to identify what are called the “bandwidth hogs,” and, of course, charge them more, according to the New York Times.

The endless feeling of freedom that the net gives us to explore the world, watch TV shows, download music (legally), communicate by video conferencing, have a “second life” with avatars or read texts online could be curtailed, monitored, metered. We’re getting too much for free. We knew it was coming … and this at a time when the only things we may be able to afford are just those things the web has given us. Thanks a lot.

I can’t help but draw the parallel between this and how much it costs to go to college in the States, and how long it takes (decades!) graduates to pay off their students loans. But then some people have always put a premium on knowledge.

The other day I was in the French bookstore at Rockefeller Center in New York. The French bookstore was the first tenant of the complex in 1935, but the march of retail presses on, and the rent has gone up too high for plain old French books. Who the hell reads French books besides me and the French? (I have an excuse. It’s my first language.)

The bookstore is soon closing forever. On the first floor, they used to have cahiers — those French school notebooks with grids that have now become available, popular and wildly expensive at stationers around town. The French grid paper is fast giving way to plain American lines on those French notebooks. At the French bookstore they just don’t have them anymore. Instead, there are art and decoration books, severely reduced. You can get a 1960s decorating book for $20. If you want it. Art books for $20. Good-looking stuff. In the basement there are the reading books. Everything is reduced. I browsed.

Balzac? Seventeen paperback copies of Le Père Goriot. No thanks. But here was one copy of a novella called Seraphita, written while Balzac was under the influence of Swedenborg, the mystical philosopher. I’d read a library copy years ago. Here was my chance to own one. I picked it up from the shelf; a thin French paperback, a recent edition, pretty clean. Good. Then I saw the price: $49.95.

I took it to the checkout. “Forty-nine ninety-five?” I asked, waving the slim paperback.

“What is that?” asked the man behind the counter.

“Seraphita,” I said.

“That’s a rare text. Yes, it’s forty-nine ninety-five.”

“I’m not paying $50 for a paperback,” I said.

“Is that the book you want?” asked the man behind the counter.

“Well, yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking you about the price.”

“Because Le Père Goriot is reduced.”

Here’s the message I’m getting: You can have what we don’t want, but if you want what you do want, you’ll have to pay an insane price.