Having had this argument with a right winged customer, who states that usage-based internet billing is a good thing - after all, why should he subsidize his neighbors downloading of porn/playing games, etc.?
Which makes sense. Except that it's not a subsidy. If, for example, your ISP sets a bandwidth cap of, say, 350 GigaBytes, above which you'll pay a penalty or fine or simply an additional charge - what of all those people who barely use the internet - say, visiting websites and downloading 350 MB per month - will they be then billed 4.5 Cents per month as opposed to the $45.00 everyone else pays?
Or say they block all images from their browser - text-only based internet - why, it wouldn't be unreasonable to then lower your bill to 2 or 3 cents a year - will the ISP's be doing that?
Shaw? Not bloody likely.
And consider the rise of technology over the past 10 years - 10 years ago 350 MegaBytes would have been "heavy Internet Usage". Now it's 350 GigaBytes. In 10 years what will it be? 350 Terabytes? And what will the bills look like, locked in with a 350 GigaByte limit....
The Cable Companies are kicking themselves over lost revenue.
Part of it is simply greed - get as much as you can and hope people stew in their ignorance and just pay. And some of it is to try and recoup the losses they're taking by such providers as Netflix, who offer a flat monthly fee to watch as many of their films as you want - a great business model, but one that puts the cable monopoly of $5.00 Pay Per View movies to shame. That is, if you consider $10 million dollar salaries "Losses", which, next to American Banks, only the cable companies would have the audacity to argue.