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by Splines 3531 days ago
If ISPs were treated like a utility and charged per bit, customers would have an incentive to ensure that their devices weren't dumping traffic onto the internet. It's rare that you can see a dashboard showing your usage, even rarer to see a dashboard showing your usage, broken down by device.
2 comments

With ISPs (at least in the US) moving towards data caps, this is becoming a reality. It won't fix the problem.

DDOS attacks via IOT don't have to send much data per request. If my devices are doing an extra 10Mb/hour, I won't notice. 1000 homes is 10Gb/hour and that's just a few blocks in a city. 100,000 homes seems easy to hit, which is a petabyte of data per hour.

It's death by a thousand paper cuts. If my internet bill goes up a dollar per month, it's highly unlikely I'm going to debug my refrigerator to figure out how to stop it.

I think this is missing one component though. I agree I wouldn't, you wouldn't, in fact most people wouldn't debug their refrigerator over a dollar a month bandwidth bill.

I would however take into consideration bandwidth bill effects of what I buy. By comparison: today I buy LED lightbulbs and energy efficient appliances because they will have a long term cost impact on my electricity bill.

Right, though the IoT manufacturers probably aren't going to factor in internet attacks when advertising bandwidth usage. :)
That's why I got an Asus RT-AC5300 router. It's got a beautiful traffic analyzer.

I could've built something but honestly I don't have time for that anymore.