[nbhuik]

Not sure what you are saying since the whole issue is about who is going to pay. In the west you are paying $40-$80 as a consumer while a lot of companies make money. In Asia it is common that high speed Internet access itself is cheap, but traffic costs more money for the companies providing services.

[DougWebb]

Everybody pays. I, and other Fios subscribers, pay a flat monthly fee for our internet service at a specified bandwidth. There's usually a monthly total data cap as well, but it's either in the contract fine-print or an unspecified policy that you won't find out about unless you surpass it.

Companies providing services pay as well; they also have to buy internet service for a given bandwidth, and their contracts are more explicit about total data usage.

My understanding is that the difficult bit is that the consumer's ISP and the service provider's ISP are often not the same company. So, Netflix is paying their ISP a ton of money for all the data they're sending, but my ISP doesn't have any contract with Netflix even though they're carrying the data to bring it to me. My ISP finds that unfair. But here's the thing: I'm already paying for MY service, which I'm using to get that data. As long as I'm within my contractual limits, everything I'm doing is paid for, and my ISP has no basis for crying about not getting a share of what Netflix pays their ISP.

This is all just a cover story to hide the fact that my ISP wants legal cover to offer their own service that competes with Netflix, to make it cheaper and crappier than Netflix, and to compete by charging their customers more for Netflix's "premium" bandwidth, while offering their own service for a "discount" bandwidth.