[Zigurd]

There is already a vocabulary for why you are conflicted. It is called the insurance effect: Even though all the non-heavy users of the Internet are paying, in their flat rate bill, for the heavy users, most of them are OK with that arrangement because they are "insuring" themselves against the day when they, too, might become a heavy user.

What you are articulating is the risk that one day, you might move a few terabytes of photos, or upload your music collection to Google Play Music, or buy Carbonite backup, and you have only a vague idea what each of those services are going to do to your bandwidth use.

In theory it is rational to pay per bit, but that also assumes you know much more about your future use patterns than any consumer would know.

Now here comes the plot twist: Do m2m customers get cheap rates because they are willing to pay per bit? Noooooooo! They take it up the ass on a cost per bit basis. So maybe ISPs are just greedy bastards.