This argument makes no sense. The only way that an ISP could rip people off this way would be if the standard unit of measurement across the ISP industry was e.

This argument makes no sense. The only way that an ISP could rip people off this way would be if the standard unit of measurement across the ISP industry was e.g. bytes per second, and one rogue ISP listed their figures in bits per second. Thus, that one ISP would misleadingly appear to be 8 times faster than the other ISPs. But in reality, all ISPs measure their bandwidth speeds in bits per second. Thus there's no ripoff happening -- if you compare the speed numbers from two competing ISPs, and they're both in bits per second (which they are), then everything works out fine and you can choose the faster of the two. And anyway, it's not just ISPs or whatever. Basically the entire networking industry measures speed in bits per second. It is totally standard.