"There is a finite amount of bandwidth. The options that have been presented to solve this problem are traffic shaping and capping, so please either throw your towel in with one of those or propose another idea."
Your premise isn't based on fact. The major ISP's have agreed that there is no bandwidth problem,
There is no such thing as an unlimited bandwidth router. Thus, at some level there is always a finite amount of bandwidth. What was "practically unlimited" 5 years ago is woefully limited as the media streaming gets more and more pervasive. Regardless of the true motives of AT&T the premise is still quite sound and relevant.
Around where I live, BT means Bankers Trust, and BA is bugger all.
In the states, BA (Bank of America) is pretty much "bugger all" as well.
"Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds." -- that's straight from the corporate memo.
Another service to stop using. I'd rather pay/subscribe than listen to ads (not that the same promise didn't stop ads on cable tv). Not even regular radio interrupts songs in the middle, although a lot of obnoxiously talk into the beginning or cut off the end with their chatter. And replacing Satellite Radio with an iPhone/data_contract + Pandora seemed like a decent idea a while back.
Ok, so what's stopping you? I pay $36/year for ad-free Pandora. You can too. Beats the heck out of my XM subscription in the car, which has ads on an awful lot of its channels in spite of the promises otherwise.
The article says that the industry has backed down in some states and some credit-freeze laws have passed, but with conditions and business-friendly exceptions — for instance, Delaware had to eliminate a provision that included fines for merchants that failed to secure customer data, before the law could be passed."'The banks, the insurance companies, credit bureaus and retailers really came out of the woodwork and fought hard against it,' [activist George Fitzgerald] said. 'I thought it was good for them and the banks. I thought with all the ID theft going on, people might even get to the point where they'd be afraid of using the [banking] system. I thought that since the credit bureaus were making a bundle of money off of trading consumers' information... that they should offer a way to protect that information.'
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
