To add a nuance to your argument, "wild spaces" have intrinsic value for the commodities and services they generate. Off the top of my head, some things that wild spaces provide that agriculture does not: water storage, water filtration, flood prevention, soil stabilization, timber, crop pollination (bees)... This is before you consider secondary effects like enhancing neighboring property values and recreational activity value.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_valuation

It can be hard to put a price tag on them, but presumably in some cases converting wilds to farmland and/or living space results in economic loss.

Good points, I wholly agree that bandwidth caps and time-of-use pricing are a good thing if done right. There's still the problem that under most systems the service provider will likely be the entity collecting the congestion tariff. This might set up an incentive for them not to upgrade capacity so that they're able to collect "congestion" rents more often.

So yes to bandwidth caps (as part of a two-part tariff structure), yes to pricing at wholesale cost of bandwidth plus some epsilon, and yes to congestion pricing, with the caveat that the premiums paid during congested periods should be collected by someone other than the ISP - say, a federal regulator that uses the money to monitor/curb their monopolistic behavior. ISPs would still have an incentive to invest in extra capacity as that's the only way they get to sell more bandwidth/make more money.

Having a bandwidth cap per se is not a bad thing from a societal perspective; if there really is a marginal cost to carrying a GB of data you'll only get the socially optimal result if you price bandwidth at that marginal cost. From that perspective the Netflix degradation referenced in the article could be a good thing; if individuals value the higher video quality less than the price of transmitting it, the right outcome for society is for them to see lower quality video at lower cost.

Of course, the marginal price for a GB of data these days is near zero -- (one site pegged it at $.03). AT&T has a fine idea, they're just pricing it 150x too high. The fact that they're able to do so screams market failure/monopoly to me.

Did you use RECAP when you were retrieving the docs? If you're into looking up things on PACER and sharing things that should be free you should give it a whirl.

Maybe it's my internet marketing background, but when I read about a 12% conversion rate of interested people reaching a page, I don't think "hey, these people don't want to opt out," I think "hey, this website has some serious usability issues."

Here's what I experienced: Found the opt out page, hit select all, and clicked submit to opt out. I was taken a page with ~50 little messages saying "You have successfully opted out from this network." It wasn't until I scrolled down to the very bottom (passed all these messages) that I found the notification: "Please click continue below to confirm the results of your opt out requests."

Despite clicking "submit" and getting what looked like 50 success messages, nothing was actually saved until I clicked an innocuous link on the next page! One gets the impression they're not trying very hard.

For executives who spend most of their work-day running from meeting to meeting, the boons of constant connectivity, super-portability, and a large screen for reviewing metrics are a huge win.

I work at a major tech company. While the vast majority of the employees have no business using an iPad for anything other than iPad development, it's a staple among execs. It slips in a brief-case, can display large pretty charts/email/calendars, provides a better interface than a blackberry or iphone for answering emails, is pretty much instant-on, has 3G so they can use it on the road, and it can be passed around at a formal or informal meeting in a way that a laptop really can't.

I don't own one, but I understand why these people do. I also understand why other non-execs at my work have them; it pays to resemble the boss.

The other killer app that I don't think is fully realized is medical services. Nurses/doctors spend large chunks of the day going from patient to patient, reviewing files, and looking up symptoms. The last four doctor's offices I've visited have all had computers in the room for the practitioner to look stuff up on, and every single one of them does so. None of what they do couldn't be handled just as easily on an iPad, and the aforementioned portability/constant connectivity would be super-useful.

Did a search, but this article didn't come up. Looks like someone else beat me to it. Sorry!

Conversely, I have had lunch with "dumb phone" users that leave their phones on the table and text several times a minute; a behavior that seems much more common with my niece/nephew and other people under 20. I'm not sure the problem is that "smart phones" are changing everything, I think it's changing social norms with respect to the trade-off between physical and digital presence. It'd be nice if the pendulum swings back a little, but I wouldn't count on it.