My first reaction: This solution would basically kill what little remaining fun there is to be had browsing the Internet and all but assure no new sites/smaller players will ever see traffic.
Curious to hear other perspectives here. Maybe I’m over reacting/misunderstanding.
Depending on the implementation (a big if) it would help smaller websites, because it would make hosting much cheaper. ISPs don’t choose what sites users visit, only what they pay. As long as the ISP isn’t giving significant discounts to visiting big sites (just charging a fixed rate per bytes downloads and uploaded) and charging something reasonable, visiting a small site would be so cheap (a few cents at most, but more likely <1 cent) users won’t weigh cost at all.
But users depend on major sites like google [insert service] still and will prioritize their usage accordingly like limited minutes and texts back in the day, right?
Networking is so cheap, unless ISPs drastically inflate their price, users won’t care.
The average American allegedly* downloads 650-700GB/month, or >20GB/day. 10MB is more than enough for a webpage (honestly, 1MB is usually enough), so that means on average, ISPs serve over 2000 webpages worth of data per day. And the average internet plan is allegedly** $73/month, or <$2.50/day. So $2.50 gets you over 2000 indie sites.
That’s cheap enough, wrapped in a monthly bill, users won’t even pay attention to what sites they visit. The only people hurt by an ideal (granted, ideal) implementation are those who abuse fixed rates and download unreasonable amounts of data, like web crawlers who visit the same page seconds apart for many pages in parallel.
Yeah same reaction here - there's no world in which ISP's would agree to this and even if they did I don't want to add them to my list of utilities I have to regularly fight with over claimed vs. actual usage like I do with my power/water/gas companies.
Curious to hear other perspectives here. Maybe I’m over reacting/misunderstanding.