Is Usage-Based Billing A Step Backward?

A new brief circulated by consumer watchdog Public Knowledge, The Wrong Tool for the Job: Data Caps, Price Discrimination and Bandwidth Pricing, dissects three different methods ISPs have used to gauge and bill consumers for Internet use, and it highlights how data-based pricing “is a move back toward the per-minute strategies of the past.” The paper points out that time was the first means of billing a customer based on how long they wants to stay on the Web, and then speed stepped in to fill time’s old role. Operators’ migration to usage-based billing “is a step backwards,” Public Knowledge posits, because “it reintroduces meter-watching to the Internet experience and forces consumers to become experts on megabytes, gigabytes and dynamic streaming rates.”