We are really only paying for bandwidth to/from our providers. Everything in-between is best effort, nebulous peering arrangements, etc.
> But, ISPs charge their customers for 'unlimited' bandwidth
I doubt you can find a single residential Internet provider who advertises unlimited bandwidth at this point. The marketing for 'unlimited' started to counter dial-up services like AOL who billed usage by connection duration not bandwidth usage.
> having all the major content providers on-board with calling them out on throttling will keep them from doing it
Way more likely ISPs will do a little deep packet inspection and re-write the page to have a message along the lines of "Netflix & Google are the reason your rates keep going up. Your video is buffering because Netflix & Google want YOU to pay more for Internet service"
Nation-wide? Maybe. But there are plenty of ISPs that offer unlimited bandwidth as a differentiating feature. See sonic.net, which covers most of CA[1].
Haha, good luck with that on increasingly HTTPS-only services.
I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not. I fully intend to be provided connectivity to the wider Internet at the speed advertised. The money I'm giving to them pays for the peering arrangements that let that happen. Let me put it another way, I wouldn't pay anything for a connection that's just to/from Comcast with no wider connectivity.
>Way more likely ISPs will do a little deep packet inspection and re-write the page to have a message along the lines of "Netflix & Google are the reason your rates keep going up.
Netflix and Google can just use HTTPS if that happens. I believe Google already does.
I know it's not US based, but looking at ISP's and their offerings elsewhere, there are options available. For example I have an Unlimited ADSL2+ connection from TPG (www.tpg.com.au). The trend locally seems to be ISP's offering more data and more value for money (Unlimited in some cases, but 500GB / 1TB plans for marginal fees per month)
But, ISPs charge their customers for 'unlimited' bandwidth, a lie, and then have ghost caps, throttling, etc. The only person being dishonest here is the ISP. And having all the major content providers on-board with calling them out on throttling will keep them from doing it since it will 1. make their customers angry/consider switching and 2. cost them quite a bit in support hours. So, they'll be forced to switch to a more honest set of advertising, billing, and bandwidth counting based on individual usage.
Granted, we'll still have to put up with their monopolies, lack of common carrier rules (so your home VOIP phone is offline for weeks and you can't do anything about it), poor customer service, etc. Realistically, we'll need wireless to come up with better plans to force them to be competitive. Living in NYC and having only a single cable company as your option (unless you want incredibly slow DSL that was down 1 week of my 1 month trial) is kind of silly at this point.