Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired)

It would be nice from a transparency point of view if ISPs would choose between either playing the averages or actually charging for bandwidth, but business reality dictates the situation we actually tend to see, where everybody is told they'll get "unlimited" service and a handful who, mostly through greed but not always, jack themselves into the 99.9th percentile find themselves booted off the service.

The ISP I'm with is a rare example in the UK that actually charges for bandwidth. I've never hit the "free" allowance of 50GB per month, but it's there and most of my friends (who download copies of movies and music routinely, and more importantly live with other people who do likewise) would probably run up a significant excess charge each month, which is why they're with bigger ISPs that don't charge this way.

They're effectively being subsidised by people like my mother, who might go two days without even checking email. But that makes good business sense because the first byte cost (the cost of providing the service at all, without bandwidth costs) is fairly high so there's no money to be made offering a discount rate to those who use it very little.

Agreed that Net Neutrality is not about such things, but I think the present situation is frustratingly opaque for the consumer because the difference between what seems intuitively to be abuse (e.g. buying ten 10Mbit/s household ISP services and strapping them together to run a 50Mbit/s web hosting company) and what feels intuitively fine (e.g. a "movie marathon" weekend when you play [legal] HD video streams 24 hours per day from settop boxes in different parts of the house and invite friends over to watch) doesn't correspond to what the ISP actually cares about.