Although Shaw has retracted a bit and clarified its intent, what we still see here is a cable provider employing usage based billing (UBB) in order to give itself a competitive advantage. To compete against Netflix, it has announced its own movie-on-demand service - but says that streaming its movies will not count against the (arbitrarily low) bandwidth cap. This, as David Eaves says, breaks what works about the internet. "The very reason the internet has been such an amazing part of our lives is that every service that is delivered on it is treated equally." See also Michael Geist, who makes it clear that it's competition, not congestion, that is driving providers into the usage based billing debate.
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