Here's the thing: I pay company X for a package delivery service from a number of locations to me. Then a while later I discover that company X is charging these locations or otherwise they "cannot guarantee that each packet arrives", and in practice it turns out that often packages without extra payment do indeed get "lost" en route. Sounds weird? Welcome to AT&T Inter-network Package Delivery Service, or AT&T Internet for short.

Almost every ISP already offers the ability to pay less money for less bandwidth.

So not sure what your point is.

I drive about 10 minutes a day, yet I pay for roads that I hardly use. It's a part of being part of a society. Some things we pay for because it makes things better for all of us. Education is another of those things.

I think "Rise of the Stupid Network" is still as applicable to AT&T as when it was written in 1997. http://www.isen.com/stupid.html

Do you want to switch to metered service? Most people don't, because the value of a predictable bill is higher to them than the savings they'd theoretically get from metered billing.

> Do you want to switch to metered service?

I'd rather have metered service than ISPs (who are often without effective competition as ISPs, and where the necessary property access -- which the incumbents got as monopoly telephone and/or cable providers -- to compete poses a very high barrier to new competition) that are also streaming video providers using consumption of unmetered service as an excuse to selectively try to extract rents from competitors in the streaming video space to reduce competition in that space so that they can establish non-competitive markets in that space as well.

This isn't about internet usage, its about access monopolies trying to become content monopolies.

But the real fix to this problem actually is metered billing. The ISPs screwed themselves by offering "unlimited" plans to begin with. It's the same thing that happened to the wireless providers.

Before admitting that ISPs are screwed I'd want to see their books. How much capex would it actually cost them to support Netflix without congestion? The unlimited business model is totally reasonable if almost all the cost is in maintaining the last mile.

Assuming you think that you are getting at least $92.01 worth of internet, then you are underpaying for some of the above and overpaying for some. Why is it "unfair" to overpay for some parts, if it's not unfair to underpay for the ones that you use more than the average person?

I would guess that the majority of ISP customers (at least in the USA, where prices are set by monopolies) do not believe what they are paying is fair, and use much less than average, and itemizing the bill would make this even more clear.

No, I would just pay for less internet connectivity.

Not with the current model. Since it's charged based on allocation rather than usage, in effect people with low usage subsidize those with high usage.