"Fixed-price unlimited-volume data pricing is a totally, unfixably broken idea." -Bray
This "unfixably broken idea" is how the internet spread to the general population, 1995->present. That's 17 years. Seventeen years in which even very limited carrier competition brought prices way down and speeds way up. Does anyone remember how much a 128kbps ISDN used to run?
Seventeen years in which the typical consumer went from downloading mainly text and gifs to downloading mainly (bandwidthwise) lengthy videos, many of them high def. Despite the fact that, as Bray puts it, "once the network operator has your monthly payment, they’re powerfully incented to keep you from using the network."
Now any reasonable person can imagine how mobile might change things. But Bray gives such ludicrously short shrift to the power of flat-rate pricing it is hard to take anything else he writes in the essay seriously.
Of course the idea of unlimited usage is an illusion. Consumers know this. They have always known this in the deep and visceral way that only a flaky modem/ISDN/DSL/cable/EDGE/GPRS/3G connection can convey. But they like the trade offs: The ISP limits your bandwidth basically continuously such that your connection might slow down or outright disappear and such that latency might increase. In return, your bill is predictable.
ISPs have always worked this way. Always. You'd dial the modem bank and get a busy signal. Or you'd connect -- perhaps even through newfangled DSL technology, which in theory insulated you from your neighbors -- only to find the provider's upstream internet link was saturated. Or you'd jump on a cable connection and find it running at half speed because your neighbors were awake.
What consumers liked about "unlimited" was what it meant for our pocketbooks: Your use is unlimited as far as the bill is concerned.
Metered pricing is an illusion, too. The illusion is that you pay for what you use. But of course that's not true. No one is proposing dropping monthly mobile fees, you notice. So 0 bytes != $0. Also, having a million dollars to blow will not magically get you unlimited bandwidth. All the limits of network contention with fellow users, and all the limits of the network itself, are still there. Sure, other people might USE less data. But also, the telco might BUILD less infrastructure as a result. So in a way metered is the worst of all worlds: You still get the implicit limits and unreliability of a mass consumer network, PLUS new explicit limits that allow the telco to wallet-rape you.
It is amazing to me that someone as smart as Bray looks at this tangled mess of competing, differently- (but not-very-differently-) crippled versions of paid network access and actually accepts the abstractions at face value and, worse, writes off the arguably slightly less realistic abstraction as unworkable when that very abstraction is the reason he draws a paycheck from a company that sells web advertisements. I mean.