In all fairness to broadband providers, the argument that "I pay for the bandwidth, why do they care" isn't a slam-dunk. Here's, at least possibly, why:
Imagine it costs a cable company $70 a month to provide you with 600kbps downstream access. Presumably for a large majority of home users this cost is too high -- they may be only willing to pay, say, $50. On the other hand, there may also be some business/high volume users who would be willing to pay up to $90 for the same service. The basic point being that different people value the exact same service differently.
Now, if you're an ISP you can get more customers if you can charge the residential people $50 and the business/high volume people $90, than if you just charged everyone $70. This is called "price discrimination" and, despite the title, is an extremely good thing -- it's how most businesses survive -- think of the difference between and coach and first class ticket.
The problem is what's to prevent the business customers from just paying the $50 for the service. Another word for this is "arbitrage" i.e. taking advantage of a discrepancy in pricing for the same item. The solution is to try to come up with some way to sell the same product for different prices but ensure that the business users pay the higher price and the residential users the lower.
Again the thing to keep in mind is that this is a good thing. If you're a residential user you are only able to pay $50 because the business people will pay $90.
So one possible way to prevent this arbitrage (and I'm not claiming this is the only reason for restrictive use policies) is to make the licensing terms for business (or in this case multi-user systems) less restrictive.
Put simply, restrictive licensing terms may allow higher valuing users to subsidize the costs of lower valuing users.
(Note: I used the example of business customers willing to pay $90 for the service, but to make it more germane to this article, the argument would be that people running NAT are higher valuing users than single computer users)
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In all fairness to broadband providers, the argument that "I pay for the bandwidth, why do they care" isn't a slam-dunk. Here's, at least possibly, why:
Imagine it costs a cable company $70 a month to provide you with 600kbps downstream access. Presumably for a large majority of home users this cost is too high -- they may be only willing to pay, say, $50. On the other hand, there may also be some business/high volume users who would be willing to pay up to $90 for the same service. The basic point being that different people value the exact same service differently.
Now, if you're an ISP you can get more customers if you can charge the residential people $50 and the business/high volume people $90, than if you just charged everyone $70. This is called "price discrimination" and, despite the title, is an extremely good thing -- it's how most businesses survive -- think of the difference between and coach and first class ticket.
The problem is what's to prevent the business customers from just paying the $50 for the service. Another word for this is "arbitrage" i.e. taking advantage of a discrepancy in pricing for the same item. The solution is to try to come up with some way to sell the same product for different prices but ensure that the business users pay the higher price and the residential users the lower.
Again the thing to keep in mind is that this is a good thing. If you're a residential user you are only able to pay $50 because the business people will pay $90.
So one possible way to prevent this arbitrage (and I'm not claiming this is the only reason for restrictive use policies) is to make the licensing terms for business (or in this case multi-user systems) less restrictive.
Put simply, restrictive licensing terms may allow higher valuing users to subsidize the costs of lower valuing users.
(Note: I used the example of business customers willing to pay $90 for the service, but to make it more germane to this article, the argument would be that people running NAT are higher valuing users than single computer users)