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The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) last week publicly joined Free Press and Public Knowledge in recommending a metered Internet service as the alternative to Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling. The extremist “Net Neutrality” crowd that wants to regulate the Internet with bans on per-user charges/contracts for Enhanced QoS are so busy trying to revive their cause by using the Comcast issue that they’re overlooking the fact that these three groups are trying to bring you a metered Internet service. The media for the most part has missed the boat on what’s really going on and they present this to the public as if EFF is trying to protect the public’s interest from evil corporations.

The EFF goes as far as touting the Australian model for broadband service. Just to be sure this isn’t some kind of mistake, I personally confirmed with EFF this is what they want. In their report they write:

The Australian broadband market offers an illustration of how this can work in practice. The selection of Australian broadband options can be searched at http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc-plan.cfm. It includes a wide selection of plans with different peak and off-peak quotas, some with a traffic shaping after a quota has been passed and others with a wide range of per-gigabyte fees. It also includes explicitly “no set limit” plans where the ISP reserves the right to deem certain usage excessive, and more expensive, truly unlimited plans where the user can saturate their link 24/7 if they wish.

I checked out the link and a Cable broadband connection costs $40/month with a 400 MB cap and a $150/GB overage charge. Just imagine if you accidentally left the BitTorrent client on for a weekend or if the kids use Grandma’s computer to download a bunch of videos racking up hundreds of dollars in charges. We’re all going to have to go back to the cell phone model where we worry about peak and off/peak hours and how many megabytes we used just like we worry about how many minutes we use.

Well no thanks EFF, I as an American have no interest in paying higher prices like they do in Australia (no offense to the beautiful country of Australia and its people). Not only does a metered Internet service plan screw the low-end users, it makes BitTorrent or any kind of peer-to-peer networking cost prohibitive. The EFF ironically claims its standing up for BitTorrent rights when it fact it would kill it with metered Internet services.