2) An extreme minority of users are impacted by broadband usage caps.
How about throttling?
Are we extreme minorities too?
See, I'm not a big user of streaming video, and the only time I use torrent networks is when I download a Linux/FreeBSD disc, which is perfectly legal as this is how many of them are distributed.
I am, however, tying to get some work done this weekend, but I've been thwarted by Comcast all day.
I am a Systems Administrator, so I pay $115+ tax for the highest broadband tier they offer (50Mbs), but when I begin transferring files via rsync and sftp, my transfers get progressively slower until they move at about 56Kbps.
Try moving a 4gig tarball through at that speed.
Oh, and I haven't even hit my bandwidth cap this month. I never do.
So, here I sit in what is supposedly the greatest country in the world, in one of the most tech-centric cities in the world (Seattle), paying over $100/month for broadband, and I'm getting the same speeds as I was in 1997.
And more often than not, I listen to my fellow consumers tell me that this is just fine ... after all ... I'm using more data than the average person.
God forbid an American spend his/her weekend on the Internet doing something more than watching compressed YouTube videos of men getting hit in the groin with a football. While the rest of the world leaves us further and further behind in broadband usage, we just apologize for monopolies that we have while blaming the customer.
There is no less intellectual approach to the problem than blaming the "1%".
There will always be a 1%.
Always.
When you kick off today's 1%, tomorrow's 2% becomes the 1%, until they get kicked off an the 3% becomes the 1% ...
Assuming they're all evil just because you aren't one of them, is kind of the problem with the American public in general.
According to the American public, it's always the other guy who gets too much government assistance. It's always the guy down the street who gets too much healthcare. It's always our neighbor who uses too much bandwidth.
It's all his fault.
And it's all the big, bad, broadband user's fault that he actually uses that big, expensive connection.
If he'd only grab a beer and turn on the football game like a normal person, he wouldn't have the problems that he does.
The way things are going, it looks like that's going to be my fate soon. Comcast has made it a very unproductive day.
Not that I can blame them. I'm completely at fault here.
After all, I'm an American consumer. I'm always at fault.