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Bill Ready To Ban ISP Caps In the US
xclr8r writes "Eric Massa, a congressman representing a district in western New York, has a bill ready that would start treating Internet providers like a utility and stop the use of caps. Nearby locales have been used as test beds for the new caps, so this may have made the constituents raise the issue with their representative."
Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.
The summary grossly misrepresents what the congressman is proposing.
This bill doesn't "ban ISP caps". It simply says that ISPs will start to become regulated in the same way that phone companies, for instance, are, so that a given ISP would have to put in a submission to raise their rates, explaining why they need to do so, etc.
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.