Former FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate, who worked at the FCC until earlier this year, stirred up some geek angst recently by tying World of Warcraft to the college drop out rate. Tate was also a well-lobbied proponent of digital rights management, and often regurgitated most of the broadband industry's talking points as well. Given her pro-industry views on nearly every subject, it didn't take long for Tate to find a new home at a deregulatory "free market" think tank, cheerleading the industry's belief that we need metered billing for the fairness of the nation's grandmas:Not coincidentally, Tate uses the exact talking points currently being used by carriers like AT&T to justify their foray into metered billing: it's for the fairness of grandma. Of course the move to metered billing has nothing to do with fairness, and has everything to do with already very profitable companies making more money, pleasing insatiable investors, and protecting TV revenues from Internet video.

Unfortunately for both Tate and AT&T, grandmothers are smarter than they think.

The argument that metered billing would allow carriers to charge ultra-light users ultra-light rates certainly sounds delicious, but will never happen. "Grandma" should probably be paying $3 a month for bandwidth if all she's doing is checking e-mail, but you can be fairly sure she'll never see these kinds of rates under AT&T's dream model of low caps and high overages. It would be nice to think AT&T's primary interest is fairness in billing, but to believe such is naive.

Tate is primarily fighting against the new legislation crafted in New York by Representative Eric Massa, which she proclaims would stop carriers from exploring creative pricing options. In reality, the new bill allows for creative pricing models, but would prohibit ISPs from gouging consumers with said models. While carriers like to talk about how they should have the right to new pricing models, so far they haven't offered any alternatives to flat-rate pricing that create additional value for consumers.

It is possible that legislation isn't necessary, given that consumers recently formed a grass roots alliance and unequivocally told Time Warner Cable they were not going to buy broadband tiers with caps as low as 1GB and overages as high as $2.50 per gigabyte. Still, Tate's latest effort to regurgitate company talking points instead of actually understanding the issue she's talking about says more about the FCC's revolving door between lobbyists and regulators than it does about metered billing.