Does Net Neutrality need Usage Based Billing?

It may not be surprising that many of those shocked by recent news reports of a threat to ‘Net Neutrality’ are the same ones who object most strongly to ‘Usage Based Billing’, but it is nonetheless a bit odd.

After all, if people paid for internet service on the basis of how much of it they used then they would be in a much stronger position to object if the services they want (as opposed to those their ISP wants to sell) were provided at a reduced speed.
I have said before that I wouldn’t mind UBB if it was done on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than imposed via effective entrapment by billing after the fact for use that the consumer is not in a good position to effectively monitor, and that was largely because what I want is mostly niche products – not in great quantity but with high unthrottled data rates for what I do want.

But in the long run there may be light at the end of the tunnel – opening out into a world of universal free unlimited bandwidth. How can this be? Well right now the infrastructure of our connectivity is by fixed cables, phone wires and optical fibres, but once there are enough wireless-capable smart and fast devices distributed around us then perhaps a peer-to-peer wireless network might be able to compete effectively with the current service providers – at least for those needs where the latency introduced by multiple short hops might be sufficiently offset by lots of distributed local caching (as in bitTorrent?). Of course, live phone calls and videoconferencing (and interactive gaming?) might never be freed from the need for an industrial-strength provider to handle the long hops. Interestingly it seems to be exactly the mass media products that ISPs now want to give preferential treatment which would be most effectively dealt with via the P2P alternative, so let’s hope that someone like Netflix is able to keep that option open.

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