A German court has ruled that the Internet is so essential to modern life that you ought to receive compensation if your service is interrupted.

As reported in by Reuters, the Karlsruhe Federal Court of Justice was trying a case in which a man lived sans DSL, thanks to his ISP, for two months in 2008 and 2009. The service disruption included the plaintiff’s VoIP phone service and even a fax line (hold the giggles, nerds). The judge ruled that Internet access was basic enough to his existence that the ISP should compensate him for his loss to the tune of €50 ($67) per day for the duration of the outage.

“The Internet plays a very important role today and affects the private life of an individual in very decisive ways,” court spokesperson Dietlind Weinland told reporters.

“Therefore, loss of use of the Internet is comparable to the loss of use of a car. … It is the first time the court ruled that an Internet connection is as important a commodity as having a phone.”

This little story reminds us of some words of wisdom from Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet itself and an all-around fantastic human being. In a controversial opinion piece, Cerf stated that Internet access is not in itself a human right. “Over time, we will end up valuing the wrong things,” he wrote.

In a followup interview with VentureBeat, Cerf stressed that while we all have a moral obligation as technology creators to ensure technology can be used to promote and enhance civil and human rights, he and many others are also concerned about overregulation of technologies, especially by governments.

Image credit: screen capture of Phillip J. Fry from Futurama, the original image used for the “Shut Up and Take My Money!” Internet meme

Data hogs, meet your Holy Grail.

Verizon is adding a major new option for its high-speed FiOS fiber customers: a 300 megabits-per-second data service for households with heavy Internet habits. Using the new level, customers can download a 1.5-gigabyte file in less than thirty seconds.

The reason for the new tier of service is all about online video, which, as an ever-expanding data dominator, needs more and more bandwidth all to itself. Even Verizon is investing in streaming video via Viewdini, a video platform that combines the output of Netflix, Hulu, and Comcast.

Verizon says its new offering is meant for households with five or more constantly-connected, data-hungry devices. Absent from the announcement, however, is any mention of pricing, though the new offering is sure to top the $199, 150 Mbps package that Verizon currently offers.

FiOS is a big money maker for Verizon, which reported the service accounted for 63 percent of its consumer revenue during the first quarter of this year. Clearly, the company has a lot invested in increasing the service’s reach even further. As of last quarter the company counted 5 million FiOS Internet customers, out of a possible 13.7 million customers who live in areas where the service is offered.

But in terms of speed, Verizon is not alone. A competitor on the high-speed Internet front is Gigabit Squared, which recently raised $200 million to bring gigabit per-second broadband to a half dozen communities. Google has also been on the high speed hunt, having already begun work on its Google Fiber initiative in Kansas City, Kansas. Other ISPs and cable companies don’t even come close to Verizon’s new offering.

The biggest difference between the efforts of Gigabit Squared, Google Fiber, and Verizon FiOS is the scale of each service’s rollout so far. While Gigabit Squared and Google Fiber are still very much in development Verizon FiOS has bloomed into a service that many bandwith-hungry consumers desperately want but can’t get just yet.