Yes, I believe it was Comcat who publicly admitted that data caps are just a way of wringing more money out of you.

Not sure how this can be levelled at the congestion argument. Presumably Verizon's video service is running from their data centres over their internal pipes, rather than external networks where bandwidth is considerably more expensive and probably more limited.

Anti-competitive, sure, but I think that's about it.

I've always felt conflicted about this here in Australia where different ISPs have been setting up peering agreements to achieve similar situations for years. It works out better for the customers who get the unmetered service but at the expense of competition.

I live in Denver, Colorado. It looks like Hulu has servers located in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, right on the Centurylink network. Actually, they're Akamai servers, but still. Hulu has servers right next to a VPS in Los Angeles I have access to. Google appears to do the same, without Akamai. Your anti-congestion argument fails. It appears that large content providers co-locate servers on lots of networks.

So apparently Verizon's bytes are slippery or smaller than other people's bytes. Maybe they use smaller bits or something?