"Scenario 1: Comcast does this. It's a customer service and PR nightmare; in a short time you'd have headlines about families getting $1000+ bills, people's grandparents being mysteriously charged for terabytes of data because their computer was hacked, and people hate Comcast even more because they have to think about the cost of every click on the web (Not that Comcast seems to care how hated they are). Scenario 2: Comcast does what they're doing, charging Netflix. Netflix is forced to reduce service and/or raise rates to customers. Netflix looks bad from the customer's perspective. And do you know what competes with Netflix that isn't subject to bandwidth caps or slow lanes? Comcast's VOD, which suddenly looks better by comparison. It's the last one that's the real motivating factor, I think. Comcast is doesn't want to be a low margin commodity serving dumb pipes (which is all anyone wants them to be). They want to be able to sell high margin value added services like movies on..." - Eric P