So glad I jumper from TWC to FIOS, even with a few billing glitches at verizon.
Cable is doing this to cash in on the coming wave of entertainment integration online. HD Movie downloads, HDtv over ip, news feeds, gaming communities etc. Its going to be huge.
I would think that there would be a way to distinguish Internet usage for things like downloading movies, from regular Internet usage. So would pay to provider a fee for downloading a movie, but it wouldn't go against regular Internet usage, which would still be a flat fee. Ahhh, but here is the rub, if you choose to download movies from outside of your Internet provider, with the huge file sizes, then that's what they want to control, in order to force you to only purchase that kind of content through their service. So what they could do is charge you based not on total usage, but on the size of a file, so as long as a downloaded file doesn't exceed a certain size, they won't charge, but if the file size suggests it some kind of entertainment content, then you would get charged. Of course bit-torrent programs are a way to get around that limitation.