Whether we have pay-as-you-go or not should be decided by the market ... which can only happen if there is sufficient competition. Two providers (one running coax and the other running twisted pair or fiber) just doesn't qualify as competition.

broadband already is capped. Whatever they cap your transfer rate at per second times how many seconds in a month is the max you could get in a month. If they decide to throttle that down, I better be paying less or there'll be some 'splaining to do.

Remember hulu, netflix and youtube? Those websites used to be awesome.

If I didn't use so much internet, I could get behind a pay-as-you-go service if it was cheaper then what I'm paying now and made fiscal sense, but pay-as-you-go ALL the time? Not with all the torrents I do!! No way!

I wish they offered pay-as-you-go cable service. There's about 3 channels I want in the "premium" channels and don't want to have to pay $100 for them.

As a person who uses about 2 gigs a day download, sometimes way more, I hope this doesnt happen. I like my plan now, pay X a month and get a certain speed to upload and download as much as I want.

Alot of my classes make me use a ton of bandwidth sometimes. This semester I have probably downloaded 13GB of data, and uploaded 500-700MB of data for 1 class.

"Advocates say unlimited monthly Internet service has been critical to the Internet's growth and the formation of online start-ups. Paying by the amount of Internet traffic used could damp usage and the sort of tinkering that can lead to breakthroughs, they warn."

Nailed it. If ISPs get to cap the number of bytes, R&D basically goes out the window. There won't be any need to find ways to speed up service or to look into innovation. They just figure we suckers will keep paying while they roll in their piles of money. Sad part is, we won't have much choice but to.

This is all Google's fault for not being subject to the same rules as the ISPs under net neutrality law.

I really don't care about metered mobile broadband internet. I paid $20 for the original iPhone data plan, and I hit a max of about 1.5GB per month. Now with my 3GS, I'm paying $30 a month, but I'm doing at most about 1GB a month.

So, if I'm (A) supposedly getting their 5GB "unlimited" data plan, (B) paying more for it (and nowhere hitting that limit monthly), and (C) now they're looking to go metered, they better have a base plan of about $5 a month and put it at $2-5 for every GB thereafter.

We're getting ripped as it is with text and multimedia messaging that they better do right with a metered plan, or they'll be hell to pay.

@KTK1990: I'd guess that you're a statistical outlier though, most consumers wouldn't be using so much bandwidth, so the companies feel they can ignore your needs to cater to the grandma's who check their email once a week.

@BeyondtheTech: I think you're confused. The 5gb limit is on the data cards. There isn't a limit for iphones.

I do, however, understand your frustration with the lack of heavy usage. I don't have an iphone, but I was just as angry about paying $20 for unlimited data on my phone when all I use is about 500mb.

@Oranges w/ Cheese wants it to be winter already: if anything, I would think the grandmas would be the outliers.

I'd be ok, till the occasional Demo comes in at around a GIG a day, and then there's HULU, and 500mb patches for games..

Not to mention the unmentionables! I shall not stand for this!

"A flat-rate, infinitely expandable service is unachievable..."

That sounds like a challenge to me. If one company were able to do it, they could funnel so much business away from Verizon/AT&T/etc. that the other companies would have to follow suit or risk bankruptcy.

I read this to say "We don't want to compete in a market with flat-rate, infinitely expandable service. It's much easier for us to lobby Congress to get our way then it is for us to innovate in the open market."

ISPs act as if broadband is going to be growing to an Nth degree for the foreseeable future. With all of them refusing to expand coverage and upgrade their networks, despite subsidies by the government and ever-increasing prices, I'd like to know where all these new customers will come from. I believe it is a pretty mature market. The only thing that can change is the content being downloaded...netflix HD vs youtube standard quality, and I doubt that will increase that much either.

I'm not entirely against metered broadband, but it's the implementation that will almost definitely be wrong. I can see them using it as a way to simply raise prices so people who use little will be paying about the same they are now and everyone else ends up paying more.

Don't worry, people! Surely the free market will save us!

@dp05 - now with less...fizzle...: Of course there's a reason to make things faster. If you sell per byte, and you make things faster, then the customer will burn through the bytes faster. Mr. Torrenty Torrent will download three torrents at once, instead of two, for example.

@Skaperen: EXACTLY.

Internet service started as pay-as-you-go, with dialup. But the phone lines were just dumb tubes, so you could have a shit-ton of ISPs competing for your dollar. So they lowered rates. And eventually they introduced unlimited plans.

The network needs to be dumb again. Like the man said, it's a series of tubes. Make those tubes a utility, like any other, and let real competition hit the marketplace.

@Saboth: It's not new customers. It's current customers increasing their bandwidth usage through more "always-on" web services and more sophisticated use. Think YouTube style video streaming and Pandora/Last.fm style music streaming - years ago no one was using those services, now they have millions of customers using them. We're using the net for more social purposes as well, which involve way more connections and data transfer per day then old, more passive systems.

I just saw an article recently that showed exponential growth in the use of AT&T's network over the last few years. I would say it will increase more than you suspect.

Metered broadband is not a necessity. Go to Sweden, Japan, Finland, or any other wired country. Their UNLIMITED broadband starts at around 75Mb/s. Ours tops out at around 50. And they pay less. It's not a technical requirement, it's a GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY requirement.

@Skaperen: One could argue that this would be a constitutional violation, as well. Commerce clause ahoy!

@BeyondtheTech: Your right to bring up texting costs. They don't cost them anything, but to us are real expensive. If I really thought the internet rates were going to have anything to do with actual cost, I might be OK with it, but they have proven that it won't be the case.

I remember AOL in 1991. It was metered.

@Sheogorath: Maybe, as soon as we get one. A free market would mean that any company with capital could start a competing business against Verizon/ATT/etc. But we have this federal organization called the FCC that prevents open access to this market.

So, since the government creates a non-free market, we must rely on the government to fix it, unless they want to deregulate and become a free market again (not very likely).

Please, don't call this "the free market".

I thought ISPs already had the ability to charge for (or cut off) any bandwidth over the account's secret 'unlimited' monthly limit. This smells like a money-grab, pure and simple.

I'm also still waiting for a la carte cable/satellite service. My family watches precisely one channel, yet we're required to sign up for a minimum of 80 channels to access it. =/

This will shoot cable operators in the foot. If the choice is between more bytes or more cable television, its bye, bye cable television.

@TheFlamingoKing: Right now, ISPs are free to implement pay-as-you-go or not. The only congressional proposal mentioned in the article is one that would take that option away from them. Are you saying that the ISPs are wrong to lobby congress to prevent laws that limit their ability to run their business?

Or are you insinuating that they would lobby Congress to ban flat-rate service? Nobody has proposed that because it's preposterous. They're already in a market with flat-rate service. Just as it would not be to their advantage to have a law banning metered service, it wouldn't be to their advantage to have a law banning flat-rate service.

Yeah good luck getting this done ISP's. You're not making any friends with this.

@Oranges w/ Cheese wants it to be winter already: I have to agree. Most internet providers are now tv providers. They should make that a two way street and do the same for tv pricing. I counted it up the other night, I look at seven channels and if nothing is on those turn off the tv. What I would lose in per byte billing I would gain in a la carte tv.

@SamtheGeek: Nearly any other wired country is A) smaller and therefore easier to wire and B) had huge government subsidies that laid the fiber that allows them to have such nice connections for so cheap.

So yes, here and there, there is a business sustainability requirement. If the government wants to foot the bill for billions in unprofitable infrastructure improvements, the broadband will indeed improve as it has in your example countries. Otherwise, we can't expect AT&T to make investments that are going to lose money just because people have a "right" to fast broadband.

@Oranges w/ Cheese wants it to be winter already:
Pay as you go for cable TV would be awesome. My cable bill would only be about $5-$10, since I only watch a couple of the channels I receive.

Hmm... and why is this happening? First off, let's all remember the amazing job we did breaking up Ma Bell in 1984.

Second, we deregulated the phone industry in the 1990s based on agreements to have fiber rolled out during that time (think FiOS, etc). [www.niemanwatchdog.org]

Hmm... so deregulated industries have absolutely no incentive to provide services which they aren't legally bound to. (BIG mistake on our part).

Oh, and then those companies merged creating mini-monopolies, thus avoiding that pesky c-word (competition) and charging us whole body parts for basic services.

So here we are in 2009. The country that created the internet and the boom to make it a cash-cow and a symbol of American freedom and liberty, is stuck with an infrastructure from the '80s; barely into the standard of service we thought we would have at the end of the '90s. So what happens when people want to use the internet the way they should in the 2000s with 1990s technology? No bandwidth!!

So now we have to pay an ass-load to the ISPs (Ma Bell essentially (AT&T, Verizon)) to get to where we should have been 13 years ago. I fucking love this country.

Yes, if they can't charge content providers for head of the line privileges (cause of net neutrality) then they'll gouge their customers for it with metered rates.

Problem is, if I recollect reading somewhere (probably here) if they change to metered, doesn't it change their basic structure from being a service, to being a utility, which would force them to have to JUSTIFY the cost per whatever under some regulatory watchdog?

@frank64:
Texting is expensive if you insist on using AT&T as your carrier. Try a better carrier with better rates.

@KTK1990: If you use more of a service than others, why shouldn't you pay more for the service?

@flyingember:
When I first had AOL (in its infancy), it wasn't uncommon for my AOL bill to be over $300.

@Wargazm: Step 1. Buy t-1 from telco. Step 2. resell wifi connection to neighbors to cover extra costs. Step 3. Tell ISP to piss up a rope.

#1: The ISPs know the capacity of their networks.

#2: The ISPs set their advertised speeds.

#3: The ISPs know how many seconds are in a month.

#4: The ISPs know how many customers they have.

Where is the problem? How does net neutrality have anything to do with it? I would much prefer a system where my download speed is capped, but I always receive that speed (unless there is a bottleneck on the servers of the sites I access), rather than the current "Pay what we ask, and you'll take what you get and like it," billing system.

Even for upload speeds (from sites to me)- sites already have to pay to host content; Google pays for more bandwidth and servers than, say, my local Chinese restaurant's web site.

The only role net neutrality would play here is whether it matters what kind of data is being sent. And why should an ISP care if I use my purchased bandwidth to send video, text, voice, or anything else?

Also, the only cap on my usage should be the speed I'm paying for * the length of a billing cycle. If it isn't, then it must mean that the ISP can't provide all their customers with the speeds their paying for. If that doesn't count as fraudulent, we need to redefine fraud.

@Wargazm: To return to those days, you'd have to have the gov't require and subsidize cable or fiber to every home and/or neighborhood like they did back in the introduction of telephone lines.

@moore850: That's a good point. The real costs associated with operating an ISP or backbone aren't really associated with total volume over a specific period of time (bear with me), but actually with total volume at any specific moment in time. It's really a bandwidth issue, not monthly throughput, and the ISPs are already regulating that for the most part. If they're going to charge by the byte then I'd suggest that consumers demand lightning Internet speeds to balance the equation.

@moore850: I'm assuming you don't have Comcast, then?

@Michael Belisle: I'm saying that the fact they can lobby Congress to get benefits rather than earn the benefits through selling the best products to customers is the problem.

Let Verizon offer whatever products it wants. If the only thing it wants to sell is 500kbps with a 1GB cap at $1000 a month, so what? As long as I can move to a competitor that offers another product closer to what I need, Verizon is free to price themselves out of business. The key is the "openness" of the market - how easy is it for a competitor to come into business to compete with Verizon or whoever.

@thinkliberty: I tried using Netflix streaming to watch a movie once during a free trial. I have Comcast, so 30 to 45 minutes in, the movie stopped, adjusted its quality to sub-telecine/shaky-cam quality and continued. Unwatchable. And sadly, this is exactly what Comcast wants.

@Scuba Steve: This is probably a really dumb question, but that would mean online play would cost an obscene amount of money, right?

@Oranges w/ Cheese wants it to be winter already: This could be used as a tit for tat on metering broadband.

They want to meter broadband and charge for useage.
Write a law that forces them to do alacarte TV channels on a real price basis. This so they can't charge you $100 a month for Comedy Central and $1 to get the Home Shopping Channel.

There is always a way to counter a threat made.

If the cable companies started doing this we would kill our TV subscription and get some form of dumb internet connection. Then get TV over the internet, antenna and from an old style big dish.

@dp05 - now with less...fizzle...: Meanwhile other countries have cheap and unmetered internet and cheap cell phone plans.

Get rid of HD video streaming and downloading on the web. There problem solved. :)

Seriously, some of the HD videos I've downloaded plays larger than my 22" screen and my computer has trouble keeping up (a dual core AMD with 3gb ram). I'm fine with LQ and HQ, we don't need HD on a computer. But then again, I'm just not a picky guy.

@Oranges w/ Cheese wants it to be winter already: Funny how the metered plans that consumers might actually want are the ones the monopolies don't offer, huh?

@rorschachex: "Hmm... so deregulated industries have absolutely no incentive to provide services which they aren't legally bound to. (BIG mistake on our part)."

Where'd you come up with this nonsense? In the absence of regulation, the incentive is the money that you and I provide. Companies offer services that people choose willingly to utilize. If another company creates better value, the customer leaves for the new company or chooses to pay a higher price for a lower quality product. The question is: how hard is it to create a new company to compete?

It's like everyone has no clue how to use their own dollars to get better service, and instead just expect corporations to screw them at every turn so they get screwed at every turn.