Here in Australia we've pretty much always had caps. One or two ADSL providers introduced "All you can eat" accounts and got to watch their peak time supply slow to a crawl across ALL their customers 'cos of the kiddies hopping on after school and downloading shitloads. Suffice to say, they lost a lot of business customers who were paying for 1.5Mb and getting 56k modem speeds. Ooops.
Another ISP I know of checked their utilisation levels for their customers and found that only 5% of their customers were using over 50% of their bandwidth (often more). So, they introduced caps and tiered charging. Those who used stuff all bandwidth had a REDUCTION in their connection fees while those who slurped the most saw an increase. A lot of the slurpers got pissed, wrote nastygrams and left. The majority of people paid the same and started complimenting the ISP on their improved service.
Same level of upstream investment could suddenly handle more customers and those few who left actually made it better for everyone who remained.
Fast forward to now where I'm downloading patches & updates, torrenting TV shows that aren't out yet (or are long gone), downloading some (legal!) videos and my teenage son is playing games & watching YouTube. We've got a 40Gb per month cap and are staying within it every month.
Have you lot actually checked how much you're using before you say "Caps are bad, mmmokay?"
It seems the biggest problem the US has is that there's not a lot of competition for Internet connectivity all over the country. Here I've got stacks of options to choose from to get connected with ADSL (cable is a bit more limited) so there's reasonably good competition. Over there, as has been noted by others, the cable companies are running scared 'cos the 'net is getting ready to eat their lunch (Hulu, NetFlix, etc) so they're doing all they can to ensure they still have money flowing in when their cable revenues drop.
Amazing that the USA (home of the free market and competition theory) can be in the position where people can have no choice when it comes to getting online. Who ever would have thought that could happen...