I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
But obviously, this is the reality of a consumer Internet. We all want to download and install software, and we want to consume media, watch Netflix/YouTube, and generally read web pages rather than write them, or produce videos or upload massive amounts of content. It's typically been beyond our resources, as consumers, to produce any appreciable amount of uploads that are worth contributing.
However, and this chills me to the bone to think about it, but now AIs have democratized the production of content, and so anyone who can afford a few tokens can absolutely generate mounds of spam, whether it's walls-of-text or fake music or hours of video content that they didn't need to write, produce, or edit. Hollywood can produce mass amounts of crap every year, but salaries are still paid and audiences still pay, in order to say how much they hated every minute.
So if you think about it, the commercial consumer Internet may be at a precipice where, all of a sudden, everyone begins contributing beyond their means, and it's all slop that needs to be gated and throttled and rate-limited. Furthermore, it won't be monetizable or copyrightable; people will just fill up social media storage with streams of consciousness where nobody cares. Nobody would miss it if it were deleted or shadowbanned.
The DOCSIS is a good start; I mean I'm behind 100Mbps/12Mbps nominally, so I should only be able to contribute 1/10th of what I'm consuming, currently. But do we really want a truly P2P Internet, where everyone is just shoveling slop at everyone else? Really?
Reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 2 where the AI is talking about humans getting overloaded with data, and requiring an AI to curate it into information.
This video goes into it, especially around the 13:20 mark: