AT&T announced a few days ago that beginning May 2, it’ll be instituting Internet usage caps to all its broadband customers: 150 GB/month for DSL users and 250 GB/month for U-verse folks. Go over that, and you’ll be charged an extra 10 bucks per 50 GB of excess usage.

The evil empire claims that this change will only affect 2 percent of its users. Maybe so. Doing a quick estimate, I don’t think our household will be in danger of hitting the cap, at least not in the foreseeable future. I use about 80-90 GB from my computer, but that’s the bulk of our usage. We also stream Netflix movies a lot, but at about 1.5-2 GB per movie (SD, through the Wii), we would have to watch a ton of movies to put us in danger.

But that’s not the point, is it?

The point of usage caps is to change the behavior of customers. As I noted a while back:

When something (anything) is unlimited, it has no value. If it’s wasted, it’s wasted, no big deal. There are no opportunity costs because it’s not costing you anything. After all, you’re gonna pay 30 bucks a month for data access whether you use it or not.

But once the concept of scarcity is introduced, all of a sudden that resource takes on real value. If you’re on the 200 MB plan, then you’re acutely aware that you only have 200 MB to last you the whole month, and you’ll naturally begin to conserve this now-limited resource. That’s basic human nature, and it’s what differentiates an inefficient allocation of resources from an efficient one.

However, what’s most interesting about this announcement (and again, not surprising at all) is that U-verse’s video on demand is exempt from these caps. In other words, you’re not penalized for streaming a pay-per-view movie (even in HD), but you are for streaming a movie from Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a violation of net neutrality. Not that Congress is actually willing to enforce that sort of thing.

Such a move on AT&T’s part echoes the efforts of Comcast, Time Warner, and others to kill off Netflix in favor of their own much more profitable services. And the movie studios are firmly in the ISPs’ corner. What that ultimately means for Netflix — and by extension their loyal customers — is unclear since Netflix currently owns about 61 percent of the video streaming market.

But whatever the outcome, it’s clear that ISP customers are ultimately on the losing end of the deal, whether they hit the usage caps or not. Unlimited Internet access in the U.S. is dead, and that fundamentally changes the nature of the Internet from here on out.

Previously:
The death of unlimited
The evil genius of AT&T MicroCells
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

Both complaints are valid, but at least give AT&T credit for offering something. Yes, it’s a band-aid, but it’s better than what we have now. Personally, since I would qualify for free service, I’m thrilled; my house is one giant dead spot.

Still, knowing AT&T, I can’t help but to imagine a roomful of executives laughing maniacally over their latest offering. First, they attract hoards of data-hungry customers with the iPhone, who willingly fork over $30 a month for a data plan in addition to voice and texting fees. When the service is less than ideal, they then offer them MicroCell service, which routes cellular traffic through your Internet service. Then when they decide you’re using too much Internet bandwidth, they either throttle your service or institute bandwidth caps.

OK, so that last part may be speculation on my part, but it’s not that unrealistic. AT&T already throttles Internet traffic of its U-verse customers in order to provide HD video. And they’ve already experimented with bandwidth caps. So it’s not unreasonable to expect that heavy MicroCell usage would help push those endeavors further along. It also gives the telco additional ammunition to fight against new net neutrality regulations coming from the FCC.

Previously:
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: Throttled?
Bandwidth experiment: The final results
Media finally reporting on broadband caps
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

Under the current plan, Internet content filters will be mandatory for all Australians. They get to choose, however, between two different levels. The default plan blocks all content that may be objectionable to children, but consumers can opt-out, choosing a more watered-down blacklist which allows pornography but still blocks other “illegal content” (potentially including “euthanasia, drugs and protest”).

(Never mind that the filtering system probably won’t be very effective or that the deep-packet inspection required at the ISP level will cripple Internet speeds. And of course, all costs associated with the filtering will be passed on to consumers.)

As ridiculous as this is, however, I can’t help but to wonder if this same sort of nonsense is inevitable here in the U.S.  Surely not, right?

Well, think about it:

1. Some American ISPs, such as Comcast, are already filtering Internet traffic.
2. The PRO-IP act signed into law this past weekend creates a “copyright czar” that reports directly to the President and greatly increases the penalties for committing copyright infringement. (For example, illegally downloading a 10-song album now constitutes 10 separate illegal acts instead of just one.)
3. Australians have endured Draconian broadband usage caps for years, which are now finding their way into America.

Taking all these factors into consideration, is it too much of a stretch to foresee the same mandatory nationwide filtering being put into place here?

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not promoting pornography or other objectionable content. I just happen to disagree with the government deciding what’s objectionable and what isn’t.

Update: Looks like that day is already here:

One of the protocols at the core of the Internet, DNS, serves two functions: To distribute huge lists of URLs and their addresses out across the Net, and to turn URLs (”gigaom.com”) into addresses (72.233.2.54). That makes it an ideal tool for limiting the sites people can visit, because it can distribute large lists of banned sites to servers, and then refuse to resolve blocked sites when surfers ask for their addresses.

Nominum, a maker of DNS and DHCP technology for big carriers like Comcast, Verizon, and Deutsche Telecom, has launched new software to do just this. “Carriers may face mandates to not resolve to porn, spyware and so on. This is the first stage of removal for these sites,” said Paul Mockapetris, who created DNS in 1983 and is now the company’s chairman and chief scientist.

In other words, the next time you try to visit a banned site, you’ll simply get an “Address Not Found” error. You’ll also be taking the first step toward a day when your government, your ISP, and even your community will decide what it’s OK for you to visit.

What pushed me over the limit? Well, on Friday I remotely connected to my computer for maybe about 30 minutes. I also downloaded audio podcasts using Juice, video podcasts using Miro, and did some general browsing. Today I downloaded some YouTube videos, downloaded a few trial programs, and uploaded the YouTube FLV videos to Media-Convert.com to convert them to a different format.

Combined, those activities over two days amounted to a total of 8 GB of total usage. And keep in mind that’s only activity from my computer, not including Christy’s or the girls’ computers or any other Internet-connected device we may have (such as the Wii).

Here are the reports so far (click to enlarge):

The totals really surprised me, but my biggest surprise came around 8:30 this morning. Overnight I had downloaded a rather large (1.76 GB) documentary via the “Yes, We’re Open” channel on Miro. The documentary (completely free) was downloaded using the bittorrent protocol (an example of a perfectly legal use of bittorrent). Everything was fine and dandy until about 8:30am, when our Internet connection suddenly slowed to a crawl. A speed test on Bandwidth.com showed our download speed to be almost exactly 512 kbps while our upload speed was still the normal 800 kbps or so. (Normal upload speed is around 5 Mbps, 10 times the speed of what I was seeing.) After about an hour our Internet speed returned to normal.

Had AT&T throttled our Internet connection as punishment for downloading over bittorrent? I have no idea. I’m sure if asked, they would deny it.

By the way, the documentary, ironically, was The Corporation, a Canadian film about the rise of big business and corporate America. Coincidence?

Previously:
Metered broadband: An experiment