[tacojuan]

You seem to have the word incentive confused with the word discourage.

Or it's an obnoxious euphemism.

I have an unlimited data plan on T-mobile for 30 bucks. Paying by the megabyte would discourage me from using data, not "incentivize me to use less data".

>There's no reason to block servers or VPNs or tethering. There's no reason to throttle BitTorrent or Netflix or terminate anyone's service for "excessive" usage. In fact, with pay-per-GB carriers should encourage BitTorrent use!

Thank god for net neutrality, and unlimited/unmetered data, right?

[modeless]

I'm sorry I offended your sensibilities, but this is a perfectly cromulent use of the word "incentive". If you look in a dictionary under "incentive", you might find an example sentence such as "The rising cost of electricity provides a strong incentive to conserve energy."

[tacojuan]

Data isn't a scarce resource, bandwidth maybe, but data conservation is not (should not be) a user "incentive".

Carriers acting like data is scarce and in need of conserving are discouraging users from using their product...

[wtallis]

Gigabytes/month is strongly correlated with consumption of the actual scarce resource under the assumption that most users have similar usage patterns. Variable pricing based on peak times and places would be too complex to actually work well for cellular data, unlike time-dependent pricing for wired broadband or electricity.