How so? If I limit you to 1MB a month, good luck clogging my pipes. I said it's not an effective method of approaching the problem, so I'm not defending them at all.
> Your connection is not unlimited anyway; the max you can get out of it is MAX BW * seconds/month.
Not true, if you have a data cap. Hence why data caps theoretically could serve a purpose. Again though, I'm not defending them.
> Since the providers don't have guarantees about the max bandwidth, it can vary depending on the demand from the other users, I don't see why you need an artificial data cap.
I agree. My point however is that complaining about data caps is besides the point entirely. We're lacking an SLA, we're lacking any way to ensure that we are getting what we're paying for.
Data caps provide no real benefit to the idea that they sell of reducing network congestion. The only way they could is to have a very aggressive data cap, resulting in a large X% of your users not even having internet access due to being capped. This of course, is basically impossible, as people would flip out.
By focusing on data caps we are, in my opinion, focusing on the red herring. Rather than getting what we're paying for on bandwidth, we're focusing on how much total data we can download.