Comcast Ruling Means Web Usage Fees

Last month, AT&T spokesperson Michael Coe told TheStreet.com that given the usage trends the company is seeing, a form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is "inevitable. Usage-based pricing is one way to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among broadband users."

"Broadband use is surging," Coe said. "Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by 4 times over the next 3 years." He noted that AT&T's analysis of broadband users shows that a small percentage of customers use a large percentage of total bandwidth. The top 5% of consumer DSL subscribers use 46% of the total bandwidth, while the top 1% of subscribers are using 21% of bandwidth.

By Martin's own admission, the FCC wants to make sure network operators "are able to recoup a fair return on that investment. We haven't put any kind of limitations on how much they are going to be able to charge for broadband access and indeed we don't have any regulations on that." That certainly leaves the door open for companies to charge whatever they see fit, which would have ripple effects on consumers and their Internet usage.

"To put it mildly, behavior would change," Moffett writes. "Suddenly, users would stop to think about whether they did or didn't want to click on a link to a video of their grandchildren [and] whether they want to use BitTorrent at all. After all, the reason people use BitTorrent today is because it's free (read: illegal). But at $1.00 per incremental gigabyte, it's not free anymore."