Those aren't Youtube's bits coming to me over the wire though, they are mine. I paid for them, both in money to the telco for my connection through them, and to Youtube with my attention to their ads.
Granted, Andreesen was talking about mobile where pricing is N gigs/month, but even that structure might not capture true cost. It also depends when the user uses that bandwidth. During peak hours, capacity is short and end-user Quality of Service might get degraded to accommodate. Rather than complicating end-user pricing with these issues (like charging $Y for X bits at ZZ:ZZ PM), it might make sense to charge the content providers.
Netflix, for instance, during peak hours, accounts for 32.7% of all internet traffic: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/netflix-uses-32-....
Who knows what the best solution is. Maybe it's charging content providers, maybe end-users. The point is that it's not a good idea to have the government set a one-size-fits-all solution.
Why are capitalists so sensitive that criticism always registers as "anti?" Psychologists have a lot to say about absolutist thinking, calling it "either/or," "black/white," "polarized," "binary," "catastrophizing," and similar. My illustration in terms of pay-TV should have been enough of a clue of the distinction I'm making, and that that distinction was not concerned with eliminating an entire ideology.
Everyone pays for transit and it is a major cost for any website operator other than something nearly pure text like hacker-news. Even the Tier 1 networks pay each-other transit fees based on ongoing negotiation.
It seems it's very difficult to maintain awareness of where your knowledge is accurate and where it isn't the more success you accumulate as a more passive desiccation maker than in the trenches problem solver.