After the cable parasites stop playing with themselves and playing with the minds of consumers and regulators they could play with metered billing. I propose that the Cable Companies be required to start out with a test year. Customers would not be charged for the amount of data transmitted or received but their broadband bill should include the following information:
1) Bytes downloaded.
2) Bytes uploaded.
3) The IP address and name of the owner of every server that downloaded data to the account.
4) The IP address and name of the owner of every server that data was uploaded to from the account.
5) The amount the customer would have paid if metered billing was in effect.
On items 1 to 4 the usage statistics should be monitored and provided by a disinterested third party other than the ISP.
By employing a test year, customers and ISP's would have the opportunity to work out billing issues. The detailed data usage statement would give a broadband customer same opportunity to examine their broadband usage, that a telephone customer has to examine their long distance charges. If ISP's argue that doing this is to hard, they should remember that they retain this data under government regulations. The whole process could be paperless like a telephone bill. Customers can download a comma delimited file and import it into a spreadsheet file. The customer could sort the data to see how much data was downloaded by a parasitic website like double-click and where the data came from or was sent to.
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After the cable parasites stop playing with themselves and playing with the minds of consumers and regulators they could play with metered billing. I propose that the Cable Companies be required to start out with a test year. Customers would not be charged for the amount of data transmitted or received but their broadband bill should include the following information: