But with the internet, a lot of the bandwidth is used up on our behalf without us even knowing how much is being used that way. And a lot of the bandwidth usage is forced on us without our consent. When you visit a web page, how much bandwidth will it consume? We can guage how much it would consume if it was plain text. But how many web pages these days are just plain text? Flash, Shockwave, video, audio, banner ads and other cruft over which we have only minimal control all consume our precious bandwidth. And then there is all the spam e-mail floating around clogging up our inboxes and taking bandwidth to look at to verify if it is indeed spam or not. And then there are the constant probing of our IP addresses by folks intent on breaking in to our systems for nefarious reasons. That is all bandwidth that we have paid for but which is being stolen from us, forcing us to pay more when it pushes us over the thresholds of our alotted bandwidth.

A better analogy is the US Mail system. How much junk mail do we get everyday? How much of that is mail we want? How much of that is mail our mail carriers would prefer not to have to cart around and push in to our mailboxes? And how much of that extra demand on the postal service is pushing up the prices we pay to support delivery of junk mail we don’t want and which wastes resources to create and deliver?

If the ISPs want to charge us for a set amount of bandwidth, then they had better start doing a better job or preventing that bandwidth from being used up without our consent.