I think the resistance to usage-based billing is practical rather than economic. With a flat-fee scheme you can look at your bill and say, "yup, $89.95 is what

I think the resistance to usage-based billing is practical rather than economic. With a flat-fee scheme you can look at your bill and say, "yup, $89.95 is what I agreed to pay each month." With usage-based billing, the amount will float up and down and it's hard to understand how the amount is calculated. Usage-based telephone bills are broken down by calls, which you can probably remember.("What's this 46 minute call to 555-1234? Oh yeah, I called Mom last week.") With IP traffic, how do you itemize the charges? Temporally? I used to get cell phone bills that included pages and pages of stuff like "Jan 27, 4pm, 239789987345 bytes". It was completely useless. How about reverse DNS? That has other problems. • You use BitTorrent? Here's 247 hosts with incomprehensible names on your bill. • You use a VPN? A whole bunch of traffic is lumped together. • "Honey, what's all this traffic to nastyporn.com?" • It puts pressure on web sites to optimize their deployment strategy for billing clarity The "correct" way is probably to log everything, then provide analytics software. But I can't imagine my Mom generating reports just to understand her internet bill. Economically, sure, usage-based billing is a great idea. Alignment of incentives and all that. But practically, it's a pain for everybody involved.