“Dats caps” have many variations. Americans are used to the version where tricks and ISPs advertise “unlimited” but have arbitrarily defined and enforced caps

“Dats caps” have many variations. Americans are used to the version where tricks and ISPs advertise “unlimited” but have arbitrarily defined and enforced caps with no transparency where tut may get throttled, random packets dropped, that sort of thing. Australia OTOH (IMHO) handled this much better. The ACCC (like the FTC/FCC but with teeth and without regulatory capture) said it was false advertising under the Trade Practices Act to say something was “unlimited” if it has soft or hard data caps. What this did in the nascent days of Australia’s broadband was force ISPs to offer an explicit quota that was advertised. It allowed Javier users to pay more and lighter users to pay less. Some hardliners here will rejects even that but non-American ISPs have one big coat and limitation that American ISPs don’t: they have to pay to connect to America. And transpacific bandwidth certainly wasn’t free. Nowadays unlimited is more the norm and it’s actual unlimited too. This is just market maturity as external bandwidth is a lot more plentiful than 10-20 years ago. Of course, the connection speeds still suck but that’s a whole other thing. My point is that companies need to be stopped when they make false claims about “unlimited” or anything else.