After this month's public backlash, it has become clear that if carriers are going to force metered billing upon their customers, they're going to have to do it en masse, to ensure that consumers don't have a competitive alternative. Time Warner Cable understands this well, given their suspended (for now) metered billing trial carefully avoided Verizon FiOS markets, and focused on less competitive areas. Even in those markets they found ISPs like Frontier willing to ditch cap plans just to have a competitive advantage.

Offering un-metered service puts an ISP on higher ground, something that Verizon has certainly taken advantage of in recent weeks. A press release from the company this week proclaims that "unlike some cable providers, Verizon doesn't penalize subscribers for using all the speed they need." They've also previously hinted that meters are a symptom of inadequate cable networks.

While Time Warner Cable took the public relations beating the last few weeks, there's an endless list of ISPs who'd love to implement the exact same business model. AT&T and Comcast are the largest, but Insight CEO Michael Wilner has spent several weeks blogging about his own love for the per-byte billing model. Collectively, these carriers dominate enough of the market to make a coordinated, anti-competitive shift toward per-byte billing industry wide.

Would such an effort constitute price fixing, or violate antitrust laws? "Antitrust law is all but worthless for small competitors and the public," telecom attorney Jim Baller tells us, "because it is much too case-specific, time-consuming, and expensive." Likewise, new efforts to impose regulation upon carrier pricing models may be well intentioned, but there's no indication they'd be flexible enough to allow for creative ISP pricing, or that they'd make it through the K-Street carrier lobbying gauntlet.

Really, the only thing standing between a huge shift toward metered billing is consumer anger, and Verizon.

Verizon has told us that they have no plans to cap or meter, albeit while using language that doesn't rule out the possibility. While staying meter free could be a competitive boon, the temptation to impose per gigabyte charges on Internet-video hungry households may be too great for the carrier. Verizon's strained willpower is made clear by a vague, non-committal missive by Verizon's Link Hoewing over at the Verizon Policy blog, where Hoewing insists that metered billing is about bringing value, and that consumers are in charge:Of course they weren't "innovative" ideas occurring in "competitive markets," they were bad ideas aimed at markets without competition. The push also had nothing to do with value since sooner or later, customers under the metered billing model wind up paying more money for the same or lesser product. Of course metered billing is about monetizing/deterring Internet video to protect TV revenues -- though you'll never hear a carrier admit as much.

While we saw consumers stand up in unprecedented union against Time Warner Cable's specific proposal, a large part of that victory was thanks to a disastrous PR campaign by Time Warner Cable. Were Verizon to suddenly decide that metered billing is best for you, consumers would be facing the pooled PR, lobbying and disinformation resources of some of the largest companies in America. 95% of impacted customers would have no competitive alternative, and couldn't vote with their wallets against high overages.

Verizon should be praised for investing an unprecedented $23 billion back into the network, instead of sacrificing the future to placate myopic, impatient investors like so many other American carriers. Their GPON FTTH infrastructure should mean Verizon has the luxury of not having to bill by the byte. But Verizon could easily change that tune for extra profit's sake at any time. It's not like carrier claims that per byte billing is necessary to avoid fiscal and/or network armageddon have been particularly fact based anyway.

So keep an eye on Verizon. As Verizon's thinking goes, so goes the entire market.