We truly have become a nation of corporate sheep. “Business should be allowed to run business”….The public interest be damned! Our society exists only to serve the needs of those in pursuit of profit!

As a society, we are in serious trouble.

Get a grip, indeed.

Cost of bandwidth is not directly proportional to amount used because of overheads etc. but if price is proportional to cost of bandwidth there’s no problem. The user that uses ten times the bandwidth but costs the company twice as much should only pay twice is much.

Companies will never admit their costs because it allows customers to know when they’re getting ripped off.

Where possible companies will instead apply the most baroque pricing system they can where this increases profits. For other examples see cell plans, gym memberships and medical insurance.

Existing price plans worked in favor of companies prior to P2P/video. Now they don’t so they’re changing.

Your article doesn’t clarify the issue any. Next time try using less words.

Broadband is not an essential service. And who is GigaOM to decide what is a fair profit margin for ISP’s to reap? If they set their margins too high, then competitors will invest to offer unlimited services.

Let hte market place work out hte innovations.

Broadband is not an essential service. And even if it was (like my water bill or my electricity bill), other essential services are billed in a metered fashion.

Get over it.

Are there really growth problems with all the ISPs? Or are the online video services such as Netflix, Unbox, iTunes, Hulu, Joost, et al perceivedto be threat to these capping organizations? If so, if all of the organizations collude to set capping limits, where none had previously existed, I don’t think it takes a lawyer to see this issue ending up in the court systems.

I don’t know about other countries, but the US takes a dim view of anti-competitive business practices initiated by near-monopolistic business entities.

As for metering gas, water, and electricity, this is not the same thing, especially for DSL providers.

I don’t think it would be unreasonable to talk about some caps, such as the one earlier that mentioned 900GB, or something to that effect. But these 5GB caps are nothing more than a lawsuit just waiting to happen.

What I want to know is: what are Apple, Amazon, Netflix, NBC, CBS, Joost, Microsoft, Google, Warner Brothers, Disney, et al going to do about the issue of broadband caps? After all, they’re butts are also on the line.

A) Prioritize traffic; or
B) Meter usage

The Net Neutrality solution is to meter usage, but the better solution is to prioritize. Metering is a crude tool at best, because it relies on humans to moderate their usage. Human time scales – days, weeks, months – are out of scale to the time scale of network packet delivery and congestion, which are in nanoseconds, microseconds, and milliseconds.

Metering is bad, prioritizing is good, and net neutrality is a distraction.

However, I’m just about to switch ISPs from an unmetered option to a metered one. It’s not ideal, but the best quality ISPs seem forced to go down this route, with a decent level of usage included and extra traffic relatively cheap (well below $1/Gb). Provided the traffic charging is cheap enough, with a big initial allowance, I don’t see it as a big problem – as long as it’s low enough I don’t find myself thinking about the cost of downloading something.