[sharedliberty]

Well, but other subscribers paid as much as you but may not be using Youtube as heavily. When they do use Youtube, they want that fast connection, but in aggregate they use less capacity because they are less frequent users. Charging Youtube is one way to account for this difference in usage. Charging consumers based on aggregate usage (like mobile carriers now do) would be another way.

[exit]

so all you are saying is that some people pay for (N gigabytes per month) and actually use N, while others pay for the same plan but only use a fraction of N?

[sharedliberty]

I'm referring to typical home/business service where you pay for X downstream/Y downstream, not aggregate usage. Almost everyone will use the full bandwidth at some point (just watch just one video) but some people use it more frequently.

Granted, Andreesen was talking about mobile where pricing is N gigs/month, but even that structure might not capture true cost. It also depends when the user uses that bandwidth. During peak hours, capacity is short and end-user Quality of Service might get degraded to accommodate. Rather than complicating end-user pricing with these issues (like charging $Y for X bits at ZZ:ZZ PM), it might make sense to charge the content providers.

Netflix, for instance, during peak hours, accounts for 32.7% of all internet traffic: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/netflix-uses-32-....

Who knows what the best solution is. Maybe it's charging content providers, maybe end-users. The point is that it's not a good idea to have the government set a one-size-fits-all solution.