I hear that the big American ISPs are about to start charging for bandwidth. Now, of course, a lot of the rest of the world has been doing this for years, but at least some of the US ISPs seem to be going a bit mad, with quite expensive plans allowing 5GB per month, and other such silliness. I am reminded of the Asimov story involving a horribly over-complicated and expensive tax system; when this was pointed out to the necessary-plot-element-dictatorial-leader-with-no-access-to-economists, he switched over to poll tax.
On the one hand, really low bandwidth restrictions are over-the-top, and may actually effect the way people use the Internet out of fear of going over (the over-use charges are silly, too); I doubt Google is overly impressed.
On the other hand, though, no-cap Internet service probably isn't really a great idea. Inevitably, a small number of people will use the lion's share; UK ISPs give figures along the lines of 5% of users using 95% of capacity. It really isn't terribly fair that your Internet access slows to a crawl because your neighbour is downloading a few terabytes of porn, and bandwidth is not free, even for the ISPs.
It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out. Hopefully, it won't scare people off the Internet too much.
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