The Wall Street Journal this week took a look at the push toward metered broadband, and while the story contains nothing we haven’t covered here in exhausting (perhaps sometimes even annoying) detail, the Journal did interview Phillip Dampier. Dampier’s a Broadband Reports user (uid://789624) from Rochester, New York, for whom the metered billing debate was so important — he went off and created the completely consumer funded Stop The Cap website. It’s kind of amusing to see Dampier fact check the Journal‘s story for them, highlighting some key points the Journal forgets to touch on — like the fact that flat-rate pricing is entirely profitable and sustainable:

The article makes no mention of publicly available financial reports from broadband providers like Time Warner Cable that prove that at the same time their profits on broadband service are increasing, the company s costs to provide the service continue to decline, along with the dollar amounts they spend to maintain and expand that network to meet demand.

Dampier also notes how the Journal misidentifies Rep. Eric Massa (who is pushing for laws protecting consumers from over-charging) and omits the potential conflict of interest in ISPs pushing for high overages while at the same time crafting massive new Internet video empires. While the Journal does note that the average user consumes just 15 GB a month (that number is even less, according to a recent Cisco study) it omits just how low many of these proposed caps have been (Frontier thinks 5 GB a month is reasonable for an entire household).

The Journal also also helps the industry make caps sound more reasonable by measuring them in e-mails sent, an annoying and silly metric used by ISP marketing departments. Most importantly though, the Journal helps sell the idea that a shift from flat-rate pricing to the industry’s version of metered billing (not to be confused with pure per byte billing) is both necessary and inevitable. In reality, it’s neither, and the metered billing models we’ve seen proposed by carriers so far are little more than price hikes disguised as altruism and fairness.

It doesn’t inspire fresh confidence in the American press when a consumer covers the full scope of the metered billing discussion far better than the nation’s supposed top business paper and its corral of staff writers.

Link to the original article…