Why are people comfortable with paying for tiered connection speeds, but not comfortable with a monthly data cap (that can be removed by paying more for a business connection)?
It's just annoying. Even though it seems like tying the price of something to your use of that thing is the most efficient way to bill, it just sucks because then you have to think too much about every use: text messages, AOL hours, phone calls, until these things got so cheap that they weren't worth metering, all were in that category.
Personally, I suspect there's some behavioral economics ish at work here that is measurable, like...you know how some hotels and cruiseships have all-in prices? I bet people are actually willing to pay more for the same amount of consumption with the 'unlimited' plans because they enjoy not having to worry about it. This would also be pretty easy to test with cruiseship or all-inclusive resort data where they also sell other a la carte packages.
I have data cap plans on my phone and iPad, and I don't really mind them, but its only because I know that they are effectively unlimited: I never come close to using up the cap level of data. I don't watch Slingbox on my phone, etc.
I tell you what really burns me up though: the fact that even though I am paying per-gigabyte transfer fees on my iDevices, AT&T wants me to pay more money to tether to my laptop. Why the fuck should they care? The data is the data. I understood when the idae was that a tethered laptop would use assloads of data on the nominal "unlimited" plan exceeding their modelled costs, but...dude, I bought data transfer. why do you give a shit which device the packets end up on? I HATE THIS. It honestly annoys me more than if AT&T just built in the tethering to the price and I just had to pay it.
I have a Linode with a data cap of 300GB per month; if I use more than that, I pay a reasonable amount ($0.15/GB) for the excess. So if I use a lot of data one month, I get a charge on my credit card, and life goes on. I'm completely comfortable with this.
A residential Comcast connection has a data cap of 250GB per month; if I use more than that, they turn off my connection and ban me for a year. So if I use a lot of data one month, I find myself abruptly and semi-permanently screwed. I am absolutely not comfortable with this since the consequences are so severe and long-lasting.
I've heard that ISPs discriminate between "types" of content (video vs text). But I wasn't aware they were discriminating based on the company (Netflix vs YouTube).
There is no law enforcing Net Neutrality.
And really, the concern isn't that a company like Comcast will meter Netflix, but not Facebook. It's that they will meter Netflix, but not "Comcast Video Streaming" if they were to offer such a service.