Flutterby™! : On data caps

Cable Industry Finally Admits Caps Not About Congestion, After Insisting For Years Caps Were About Congestion quotes NCTA's Powell: Usage-Based Pricing About Fairness, Not Capacity: Says principal purpose is to monetize high fixed costs.

But he pointed out that the cable industry had to spend a bunch of money on its network before the first customer was signed. So, for a business that requires "enormously high" fixed costs -- digging up the streets, put the wires in -- and operational expense, "it is a completely rational and acceptable process to figure out how to fairly allocate those costs among your consumers who are choosing the service and will pay you to recover those costs."

In other words, they're trying to create an externality to subsidize low usage customers.

We need to find ways to break the communications duopoly.