The question is whether they're doing it already and we just don't know.
They'll now have a hard cap and several different service levels, with the lowest level being the exact same price as the one we have now. So, we'll have degraded service across the board.
Why? They say less than five percent of users are responsible, so find out what they're using and charge them more. We already have tiers of service with low, medium and high speed, so all that needs to get added is a traffic factor. Currently they have no right to complain when somebody uses all of the bandwidth they pay for, yet such users are summarily cut off. That is fraud, but the average user doesn't have the resources to fight it.
Come on. Really?
Why? They say less than five percent of users are responsible, so find out what they're using and charge them more.
We need the government to regulate that? Why? If they wanted to provide those users with more or charge them more, they can certainly do that now. There's nothing stopping them. But they'd rather throttle their traffic. If less than 5% are doing this and they're limiting the traffic for those users, then what the heck do we care about it to make a law for? We're going to change what 95% of people have just to regulate the way companies treat 5% of their customers? Why?
As for the pricing and the business model, none of these companies are going to lower the price of their current lowest priced offering. (I work in the industry, strangely in a sector that really would be adversely affected if these kinds of 'problems' that we are trying to 'solve' actually did exist.) They can't lower that price, as it would cut into the bottom line. A service provider will never do that. So, the lowest cost offering they have now will be capped.
The humorous thing is that when capping everyone, they will make the caps low, which will stop people on the lowest tier plans from watching all the youtube videos and downloading stuff that we're so righteously trying to protect now. That is, unless they pony up the dough to get a better plan. Funny how that works, eh? By putting these 'evil corporations' in line, we're actually empowering them to charge us a lot more for the basic services we are used to.
Why would they do this? Why the hell wouldn't they? It opens up a whole new revenue stream and cuts their expansion costs on updating their network. It's win-win for them.
And all this to solve an imaginary problem that doesn't exist. Or maybe might somehow exist now, but we don't know about it, which begs the question: if we haven't noticed it, is it really a problem even if they are doing it?