15th
Is There A Case for Metered Internet?
If you paid for your internet by the Gigabyte, would you think twice about watching a Miami Vice marathon on Hulu? Would you get mad at being rickrolled? Would you limit your calls on Skype?
Or would your ISP suddenly feel enormous pressure to provide you with as much bandwidth as you want, when you wanted it, in order to increase revenues and maximize shareholder value?
I have no doubt that metered pricing would chill demand for high-bandwidth services, and lead to the kind of thriftyness we used to assume for interstate telephone calls. At the very least, we would all have internet meters on our dashboards, and favor content providers that optimize their offerings and use low-bandwidth ads.
But in a fair market (heh), you would expect internet providers to price their Gigabytes attractively, in order to sell more of them. The more data they move, the more money they make. This is already the case on the server side. The price per gigabyte for a high-bandwith datacenter is under 20 cents, and you can easily get as much bandwidth as your hardware is able to consume.
I think it will be a painful adjustment: there issues around security, high-bandwidth advertising, family usage, and monitoring. But if metered pricing finally gives the CEOs a long-term incentive to move packets, instead of limiting them as they do now, I’m all for it.
