The electricity metaphor doesn't work. Electricity is a consumable, it costs money to generate and that value is destroyed when you use it. Data is not a consum

The electricity metaphor doesn't work. Electricity is a consumable, it costs money to generate and that value is destroyed when you use it. Data is not a consumable because it does not cost anything to created a copy - in fact you might argue that using data creates value. The only similarly between commercial electrical and data networks is that both make you pay for the size of the wire that goes to your house. Electrical networks also make you pay per unit energy that moves through that wire, in order to fund the generation of it. But such a charge doesn't make sense for a data network, because your ISP doesn't supply the data, only the wire.