Yes that’s bite, not byte. Some of the large carriers are trying to bite back against the evildoers on their networks — you know, the customers that actually use the bandwidth they are paying for. Big ISPs hate that. They want to oversubscribe the heck out of their networks. They want their customers to ignore the ancient copper cables in the ground. They want their customers to be content downloading emails and cute baby pictures.

Now the Comcast’s and AT&T’s of the world want to charge Internet users by the byte to curb Internet traffic on their networks. If you are selling a resource and trying to grow your services why the heck would you want your customers to consume less? Why would you buy services from these companies? Unfortunately some of you probably have no other option.

Time Warner Cable is planning to charge customers $1/GB for overages. That same GB costs them somewhere around 5 cents. I’m a big believer in allowing the market to set the price but this is borderline unethical. Try telling grandma what using 1GB of bandwidth actually means. Customers are going to be caught in this bandwidth dragnet. The TWC product manager that thought up this idea should be sacked.

It’s time to open up the infrastructure in this country. It’s time for cities to build and own Internet infrastructure. Google, you are our only hope.