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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody was ever doing that.

It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open?

> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.

You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.

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Exactly. It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water.

The only reason the major ISPs want this is because the old content providers are desperate to maintain their positions in the market. They think they can squeeze out competitors by joining forces with the biggest ISPs [1] and implementing zero rating and data caps. That way no one will be able to compete with them. You won't want to pay for your overages on the next Netflix when the current one has a free-pass arrangement with your regional-monopoly broadband ISP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_b...

> It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water.

Well we do. A commercial user with a 3 inch water line pays more for the basic service than a house with a 3/4 inch line. And they both pay for gallons used.

Wouldn't that mean the 3-inch water line cost more to setup? You'd probably need to add bigger piping over the standard sized pipe.

The cost to setup broadband far exceeds the cost for varying amounts. If you use 1 TB and I use 1 GB, the cost to the ISP is basically the same. We already pay different amounts from tiers defined by the speeds we chose.

But you don't pay disproportionally more for your shower than your sink, which I'd argue is the point of network neutrality.

You shouldn’t preemptively set broad regulations based on some hypothetical boogeyman scenario because regulations have unintended consequences.

It’s entirely possible that there is a non-neutral ISP service that would benefit customers. Allowing Netflix to co-locate for free is one example. T-Mobile’s voluntary video slow down in exchange for zero rating is another.

It’s unreasonable to ban business models because it’s hypothetically possible AT&T would ban 99% of the Internet.

Indeed. In my case, I'd love to have some super cheap wireless service that can't access streaming video for some of my IoT devices. Larger manufacturers can negotiate contracts for this sort of thing, but for an individual, it's only really possible if I can get a really restrictive plan.

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