There's an interesting thread over on Slashdot in response to Time Warner's decision to begin selectively throttling some high-bandwidth applications like Bittorrent.

This comment is particularly good. The author's right: traffic shaping is going to be necessary for consumer ISPs. At the same time, innovation will be best served if consumers have the option of unfettered access. There generally aren't enough competitors in the consumer arena in a given market to ensure that customers flitting between ISPs will whittle the field down to the optimal offering. And the jump from consumer-priced access to business-priced access isn't feasible — business service is just too expensive, for a variety of reasons. It's a market failure, in other words.

The slashdot nerds favor the same solution I do: metered data transfers. The common response to this is that customers hate metered access. I still don't buy that — millions of people do just fine with metered cell phone access. Pay for a monthly cushion of access, then pay a metered rate for overages. It's simple! And, I think, inevitable.

Sadly, I suspect that this will probably mostly serve as a way for ISPs to gouge geeks with new fees, rather than a revenue-neutral way for them to adopt restructured, more efficient billing practices. Oh well. It's still preferable to having my Bittorrent and encrypted traffic slow to a crawl and not be able to do anything about it.