Some users say they have protected their computers but have decided to keep their networks open as a passive protest of what they consider the exorbitant cost of Internet access.
Marriott and other hotels make large amounts of money by charging businesses and individuals exorbitant rates to connect to the internet in conference spaces and meeting rooms.
You can also use port days to catch up on e-mail at an Internet cafe, rather than paying exorbitant Wi-Fi fees of about 75 cents a minute and up for often slow connections onboard.
I stayed abreast of the news in Havana by going to the Internet café at a tourist hotel and paying exorbitant fees; for the average Cuban, an hour of Internet access costs a week's salary.
In August, Mr. Lawsky's office began an aggressive campaign against the payday lending industry, seeking to stamp out Internet businesses that offer small, short-term loans at exorbitant interest rates that violate state usury laws.
Her goal, she has said, is to create a functioning single market for telecommunications in the European Union, one that will let people speak, send text messages and surf the Internet from anywhere in the 27-nation bloc without paying exorbitant fees to mobile operators.
Mr. Vroom said Internet retailers typically spent about $100 to acquire each customer -- an exorbitant amount, because the average customer will spend only about $200 at a given site in a lifetime.
Her goal, she has said, is to create a functioning single European Union market for telecommunications, one that will let people speak, send text messages and use the Internet from anywhere in the bloc's 27 nations without paying exorbitant fees to mobile operators.
This "lemons" problem might be explained away by the fact that Internet companies, by their very nature of short operating history and exorbitant customer acquisition costs, cannot finance themselves through retained earnings (they have none!) and do not generate cash flows substantial enough to sustain regular interest payments on debt.
To Microsoft, this carried the dire threat of enabling its bitter corporate enemy either to deny distribution to Microsoft's Internet services and software for online shopping, music and video, or to charge an exorbitant rent for that distribution.
