"they like to remember it as the inverse of its _square_" (emphasis mine). You need to take the square root of your 0.007... to get the comparable number. sqrt(0.0072973530) is .085424557359 and sqrt(0.007297355) is .085424545652, each of which, rounded to the proper number of figures, matches Feynman's figure.

Those figures sound very reasonable to me. I'd be fine with $20 + $0.15/GB, and I'm a heavy user. Thanks for the explanation :)

I can understand why Comcast might prefer not to upgrade just because of Netflix traffic; it costs them money. But if that's what their customers want (and apparently, that's what we want, because we keep causing Netflix to send us data), that's what they're supposed to do. That's their job, transport the bits I ask for to me.
If they have to charge me more to cover the expenses, I can understand that (though looking at their profits, I'm not sure they really have to). But I consider it duplicitous for them to charge Netflix, who then has to charge me; I get charged either way, so Comcast isn't doing it for my benefit, they're just trying to deflect blame to Netflix. And in the process, now all of Netflix's other customers who aren't on Comcast get to subsidize their Comcast customers.

For providers and data demanded by Comcast customers. I also complain about that, but I'm not in a position to get quoted for it. Does that make it less valid a complaint?
Keep in mind, every bit Netflix ever sent me was at my request. I am responsible for that traffic. Why is Comcast trying to charge someone else for my choice?

A number have tried, generally at the city level. The usual response is to have the state level forbid it.

Can't do it. The MPAA has a lock on this style of extortion.

Not a sizable one, but my wife's uncle trades produce from his farm for produce from his neighbors' farms for personal use. It's a small market, but it's a market. Technically the government acts as a controlling authority but in practice behavior is governed by a desire not to lose the neighbors' good will; the government never gets involved.
Obviously, that doesn't scale. Which is my point; a 'free market' of any real size doesn't exist (for long). The best you find is a market where the actors have all relevant information and none of them have enough share to unilaterally push the price around. The only ways you get that is by (a) having a controlling authority regulating stuff; otherwise folks hide information and use it to gain more share to the point they control the price, or (b) by having all the actors decide not to hide info etc. The latter is improbable at scale. The former will probably eventually hit regulatory capture and go bad.

Not just without regulations, but without controlling authority. Which precludes corporate monopolies. So "uncompetitive" and "subverted by corporations" are both actually reasons to call it a not-free market.

Both of these, imho, need badly to turn into "too big to be left alone as a ticking bomb; break 'em apart."

Well, I say that's what I want because it makes sense, but I don't actually know how it breaks down. Do you have any figures you can share for how much of a monthly bill is typically fixed costs and how much is proportional to traffic?

Peering is between _peers_, approximate equals. A consumer-heavy network is not the equal of a content-heavy network. Peering is also generally between _transit_ networks, not endpoint networks. The fact that the traffic's destination is _inside_ the consumer network makes it a very different case than if the traffic were simply passing over the consumer network to reach some other network, because the traffic exists only because of the consumer's request. Should I get to charge Amazon for the privilege of sending me books?

I want my bill to be split into two parts, the fixed costs that don't change whether I shovel 1 bit per month or 1 terabyte, and the variable costs for my level of actual usage. Given that, caps are pointless, which is just the way I want it.

Beyond what tepples said... if you're pumping 100GB in a month and I'm pumping 100GB in a month, why does it matter how many users/devices are involved? Each of us has one cablemodem, so the infrastructure for you is equal to the infrastructure for me; the variable costs are the same because it's the same amount of traffic... why do more people need to pay more? Or were you assuming that more people means more data per month?

Yep. Now, given that jythie didn't say how many people in the household, we have no information on how much gets used per person. Nor do we know if a given person is doing something else at the same time; my wife routinely streams shows while doing other stuff.

I'm kind of looking forward to the lawsuits that ask "why are you suddenly able to cut your prices in half? Are you operating at a loss to hurt the competition, or have you been gouging your customers all this time? And if you've found a magic tech fix, why aren't you rolling it out to all your other customers?"