your understanding is wrong. the whole comparison to electricity or any other utilility is wrong as well. electricity is weighable and quantafiable comodity. data is not. data is media. you pay the people who create it, you pay to have it delivered, you don't pay the the people who are delivering your media a second time for the media you've alrdy paid the creator for. that's stupid. why is this so hard to grasp? i pay the same a mnth for basic cable as my neighbor. my neighbor is an outdoorsy type and hardly watches it. me, i'm a couch potato and watch 10 hrs a day. should i pay more because i watch it more? nope. the media on the tv is paid for by advertising, all i pay my cable company for is the infrastructure and delivery charges. the internet is no different. isps do not creat the data on the internet. they do not have a right to charge us for something they have no hand in creating. another myth is that some mysterious mega users are slowing down everybodies internet. here the transit analogy does apply but not the way you think. a transit bus runs it's route wether there's riders or not. the internet is the same, it's there wether your browsing or not. lets say theirs 2 old gents who love riding the buss and they have a metro pass. so they get on in the morning and ride all day till late in the evening. for most of the day they travel at whatever speed the bus is going taking in the sites. the bus only has 80 seats. they take up 2 of them. at peak rush hour there are now 1000 people tryingto get on a bus that has 80 seats, only 78 can get on this bus, 922 people wait for other buses. in the scheme of things do you really think that those 2 elderly gents are slowing the system down? they travel at exactly the same speed as everybody else and still take up only the 2 seats. the transit system doesn't even take them into consideration in any statistical way. they just know that at peek hrs they need more capacity and therfore they have more busses on duty increasing there capacity at that time to decrease the congestion. now isps are not working like this. for one they don't guarantee any speeds, all isps have some form of the upto and including clause in there T&C's (terms and conditions). it means if you have 5 mgbs service you actually have only the potential of getting that fast a speed not that you will get that speed. they build so much capacity into the system and that's it. could you imagine if transit was like that? your 80 individuals on the bus would get to there destination, the bus would turn around and then come back and pick up the next 80 and so on until all got home. that's why during peek hrs on the internet it gets slow. the so called power users make no difference. they travel on the same bus at the same speed taking up the same amount space on a seat as the next person. the only issue here is that the isp doesn't have the capacity for everybody to ride the bus in a timely fashion, they also don't guarantee it so you cann't hold them to it legally either. as far as i can see the main problem here is that our major isps are also content deliverers. does no one see the conflict of interest here? they provide content thru there normal cable and satellite systems while also giving people acccess to the internet which has it's own content providers. as long as it was nothing but webcontent all was ok, but it's no longer that way is it. now we can get the same content as there cable and satellite provides thru the internet as well. in other words the internet service they provide us has now also become there largest competitor for providing consumers with content!! if they want to compete with the online providers then do so, but to start charging people for something they've alrdy paid for has a name. it's called a racket. criminal organizations have been doing it forever and now they are doing it as well. the way they look at it, if they cann't get the money upfront from cable subscriptions then they'll get it by scamming you into paying for it online twice.
