I'm also barely interested in the argument, because I think we're having different arguments.
You say my analogies are bad, and then trot out examples that are *just as wrong*. I mean, what do you think toll roads, gas tax or city congestion charges etc are? Billing to cover road wear.
Finally, you also show your "true colors" in that in your mind, NO Analogy is good enough, so anyone who might regulate a system, or at least the Internet, ought to be pretty well versed in computer networking - which I might add is a specialization inside of IT.
Your argument that billing in a certain way is done commonly has nothing to do with my assertion of an opinion that billing in that way is wrong - specifically I think it's taking advantage specifically of peoples ignorance, and ripping them off. 95% billing is generally used for network interconnects and seems much more fair to me. That's also common, as is flat rate billing. It's common for people to be mugged in cities, doesn't make it right...
I probably haven't been clear enough, but I never intended to excuse ignorance - and I don't see that I've done so, but I know what I meant.
To step back - in the real world - the one we all live in, regulation is generally done by politicians or bureaucrats. Rarely do experts in some field regulate the field, and when they do, there's often conflicts of interest that arise - I'm imagining guilds or systems like the bar and the AMA that basically just regulate to keep out competition.
If you want to change the "real world", you need to communicate with people who aren't in your field in a way that doesn't require them to go take several classes or 5 years of domain experience. Hell, that's the point of this article - that dismissing people because they don't understand the signaling on the cable that forms the ethernet protocol that is then wrapped in an IP packet and routed etc and OSI model etc - that's like the high-school English teacher who complained about people misusing whom or may vs can. It's the complainer who gets dismissed, because frankly - no one cares.
Finally, how about you provide the mythical better analogy? I thought of the mail system, but it's not clear to me that it's better, just that it may get bogged down in details that don't matter depending on the point you're trying to address (in my case, why billing per byte seems to me to be a scam for the user). In no way does addressability per envelope, sorting, etc help illuminate anything about the point that internet throughput is largely determined by second in time capacity, and filling that capacity for a second or a month won't directly increase cost to the vendor for the equipment.
Maybe you thought I was arguing about net neutrality, or filtering attempts, or who knows what, but I was pretty much only trying to give a narrow example about flat rate vs per byte billing, and why caps don't address anything about the ISPs actual costs.