To play devil’s advocate, are we really ready for Internet to be regulated like a public utility? Like water, we will need to pay more the more we consume. You and I can pay but what about poor people? Will this discourage Internet usage?
Yes.
> Like water, we will need to pay more the more we consume.
We already do, though it's more noticeable for mobile broadband. Also, not all public utilities are metered—I’ve lived in places with unmetered public water, for instance, so the connection you draw between metering and public utilities is false.
> You and I can pay but what about poor people?
Public utilities are often subsidized for the poor (that's actually one way that broadband is already treated like a public utility).
With any luck the next generation will look at bandwidth caps the same way young people today are shocked anyone was so stupid as to allow companies to charge per SMS message.
This is a pretty common situation in many areas. The marginal cost of putting a package on a truck is nearly zero (there's a very, very small amount of extra fuel burned) until the truck is full, then the marginal cost of the next package is the cost of sending another truck. The marginal cost of putting another passenger on an airliner is nearly zero (again, there's a small amount of added fuel consumption) until you hit capacity, then it's suddenly huge.
In these other areas, we generally look at the cost as being the marginal cost of the whole truck or plane divided by the number of things it carries, rather than assigning the entire cost to the one thing that requires a new truck or plane. I don't see why internet access shouldn't be like this too.
Data costs should be pretty low, and should be much cheaper at off-peak hours, but I don't see why they should be zero.
Not necessarily; under utility pricing your bill might be $49 for maintenance of the network and $1 for usage.
I would love to reach the point where I can take these bloated, horrible web sites and make them have to publicly embarrass themselves by publishing their relative Internet consumption.
Net neutrality means ISPs can’t favor some traffic over other traffic.