Over at TechDirt, Tom Lee has
a sharp critique of Muayyad Al-Chalabi's much-circulated paper (
via GigaOm) opposing bandwidth caps. Make sure to read Tom's entire essay, but here's the key take-away:
this whitepaper merely amounts to a complaint that a free lunch is ending. Bandwidth is clearly an increasingly limited resource. And in capitalist societies, money is how we allocate limited resources. The alternate solutions that Al-Chalabi proposes to the carriers on pages 6 and 8 -- like P2P mirrors, improved service and "leveraging... existing relationships with content providers" -- either assume that network improvements are free, would gut network neutrality, or are simply nonsense.
Indeed. But Tom generally agrees that "Comcast's bandwidth cap is a drag" and that "Instead of disconnection, there should be reasonable fees imposed for overages. They should come up with a schedule defining how the cap will increase in the future. And the paper's suggestion of loosened limits during off-peak times is a good one."
Well, those are three different things but I generally agree with all of them. Let me just repeat, however, my strong endorsement of the first option -- metering at the margin -- and again highlight the optimal way to do it from an economic perspective. As I noted
in one of my many previous articles about metering for bandwidth hogs:
