The cat’s already out of the bag on this one. It will never fly. Someone will always be there to step in and be the good guy, making do with a less obscene amount of profit.

I’ve used pay-by-bandwidth services in the past, when no other options were available and I can say first-hand how horrid it is.

The chilling effect of worrying about ‘how much is this going to cost me’ to view a video or surf some hi-bandwidth page really detracts from the enjoyment of web use.

forget you-tube, streaming audio, impulsive surfing, grazing news pages, impromptu surfing and web-for-fun activities with pay-by-bandwidth the psychological impact of pennies being chipped away on every page view is a real downer.

As much as i love the internet i would have to go through withdrawl pains before i let them charge me by the byte. And dont think this couldnt happen, Cable TV was supposed to be pay service with no commercials and now look at it — for every hour of program 20 minutes are commercials , thank God for DVR.

As was brought up on another article in Lockergnome, would I have to pay for the bandwidth used by ads? With all of the flash and video ads there are, I wonder what percentage of the bandwidth I use is due to ads. I guess we currently pay for ads to some extent with unlimited internet since the costs of running an ISP (including serving bandwidth for ads) is passed on to the consumer, but it would just be that much more obvious if we pay by the byte.

It is inevitable if large corporations keep merging and allowed to have free reign on screwing the consumer as they have been doing for the last 25 years and even more so in the last 8. Can you imagine 75% of internet users in the USA are customers of 10 ISPs (with the top 3 having 41.6% of Internet Customers) imagine if that number dropped to 5, we will have pay by byte for sure then.