I think your argument is valid but there are other valid arguments too.
I work from home and drive very little. I still pay an equal (more than equal actually) share of taxes for road maintenance.
I have a cottage at the very end of a private road. I pay the same amount for 20km of road maintenance that the poor sap at the beginning of the road pays, and he only uses about 100 metres of it.
None of my kids go to school yet, but I pay for public schools.
Obviously this isn't a new debate, but I wanted to draw the parallel with pay-per-use vs. spooky socialism because I think internet access is no different.
Were these examples of other situations where people are forced to pay an unfair amount for services they don't need meant as a rebuttal? Because it seems to me that you're supporting maxaf's argument.
The objectionable parts of data caps are the arbitrary hard cutoffs and massively inflated overage fees. It's crazy that the second TB/month may cost 10x the standard monthly rate with a 1TB cap, especially since most ISPs don't provide any easy way to track or limit the amount used. It should be more linear. Really the bill should have two parts: a small fixed connection fee based on the provisioned peak bandwidth to cover last-mile equipment costs and basic unmetered, contention-free connectivity at perhaps 500kbps, and a charge for data transferred above that limit proportional to the product of data size and priority/weight. Priorities should be set on the CPE side of the link using the DSCP field according to whatever policies the subscriber chooses, with "unmetered" (weight=0) as the default classification for automated background traffic and low-priority/bulk (weight=1) as the default for anything initiated by the user.[1] Higher priority traffic would carry a higher weight in the bandwidth allocation when the link is under contention but would also cost more per MB. For example, if there are 100 subscribers using only bulk traffic and 50 subscribers using only priority-2 traffic on a 1Gbps shared link the available bandwidth (925Mbps after the reservation for "unmetered") would be divided into 200 shares (100 + 2x50) with bulk traffic getting one share (4.6Mbps) per subscriber and priority traffic getting two shares (9.3Mbps). Put another way, 1MB of priority-2 traffic costs twice as much as 1MB of bulk traffic but is delivered in half the time. Of course other priorities/weights are possible, including fractions.
[1] This part would require better interfaces for classifying traffic at the source, since almost everything looks like opaque TLS traffic to the router these days. The router has no concept of whether a human being is waiting for a given transfer to complete, or how much the subscriber (who may not be the end user) is willing to spend to speed up the process. I'd imagine an algorithm based on target speeds and a monthly budget could work reasonably well as an approximation, though, combined with some basic source- and destination-based rules.
The poor sap and you don't pay the same amount. Fuel taxes, which are levied as a percentage of what you spend on fuel, will be different for you and the poor sap who drives less. The more you drive, the more you pay in fuel tax, which (ostensibly) goes towards road maintenance.
If we wanted a pay to play model, fuel tax is a great idea. But based on the breakdown of my city's funding, basically none of the roads are paid for by it.
The poor sap at the beginning of the road absolutely pays an equal amount. It's actually an interesting problem I'll try not to tangent on. You've got a road and each person needs a certain fraction of it. How do you equitably fund the road?
