It’s because most American HNers have no competition in their internet market and can’t choose an alternative without a data cap.

Hopefully the pain will force voters to vote to make internet a utility, or cause home prices in areas with symmetric fiber connections to have higher values causing more homeowners to put more pressure on politicians.

Why would a lack of choice change how they interpret a simple reframing of the same cost?

The question was specifically "Would people be happy with" which also assumes that they would be happy with a reframing, but they are, in fact, not happy with that price at all.

Reframing or not, it doesn't matter. With zero choice, they could frame it as "you'll pay us $1000/mo and you'll stop complaining or it'll be $1500" and people would still buy it because the alternative isn't a competitor... it's no Internet service at all.

They don't bother wording it nicer because they don't have to. There's no competition.

I'm upset about this because I used to pay the $80/month for unlimited with the only provider in the area. Then, I got an email saying my $80 would only cover up to 1TB and using unlimited would cost me $50 more. I called them and asked about it and got lines like "you still have the same internet plan as long as you don't use as much". It's frustrating to have no options and the price of your service nearly double overnight with customer service agents who, because it's their job, regularly tell you to go fuck yourself.

I'm at least upset about it because few come close to how noncompetitive US ISP markets are, the FCC is totally complicit and run by board members of big telecos that want to operate an ISP cartel with regional monopolies, and no where else in the world is a physical line network connection metered because metering it makes no sense - the cost is in maintaining the lines and having the infrastructure to support peak throughput. Having people running their gigabit connection all night long seeding torrents doesn't impact the bottom line of the ISP at all, whereas everyone using a gigabit at the same hour ever evening does.

Because the pricing model isn't reflective of the real costs associated with the business its blatantly price gouging and exploitative and they can only get away with it because they have no competition because they bought out politicians to guarantee it so. Its a systemic disaster dumpster-fire mess than private citizens can't do jack about besides move to the ~2% of the country with competitive or public ISPs.

My Internet is about $20 per month - unlimited. (About 6MB/s down and 1MB/s up.) American Internet prizes are absolute bonkers.

For me it's not a framing issue. I get upset by that sentence the minute the total receipt goes above $80/mo.

Unlimited internet has been a welcome respite from the inconsistent and unfair pricing of mobile data plans. Seeing that change without an explanation feels wrong.

I can imagine ISPs responding with "Here's your explanation: our infrastructure isn't built out to have everyone downloading 1TB/mo and if you want that you need to pay for it"

To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.

So I'm personally upset over this because it's a nickel-and-diming false choice between paying even more than our already-overpriced bills, or watching your quality of service decrease because a greedy company decided not to keep up with an eminently reasonable change in standards of quality.

>For me it's not a framing issue. I get upset by that sentence the minute the total receipt goes above $80/mo.

So are you upset by the fact you can't get unlimited internet for a reasonable price, or that the ISP advertised $80 month and you had to pay $130? If it's the latter than it's purely a framing issue.

>To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.

That seems entirely orthogonal to having bandwidth caps. To the company and society as a whole, having crappy service and gouging 90% of the users for $100/month and 10% of your users for $150/month is the same as having crappy service and gouging all of your users for $105/month. If anything the first option is "fairer" because users that use the service less pay less.

In this case I'm entirely upset by the former, and will leave the discussion of potentially inappropriate marketing tactics for another day.

You're right that bandwidth caps aren't my main complaint about ISPs, but overall displeasure with internet service is relevant to the bandwidth cap discussion because bandwidth caps are a feature that contributes to that displeasure.

Fairly or not, I blame ISPs for taking us from "A world where everyone pays $50/mo" to "A world where everyone pays $80/mo". Now they're trying to turn that world into a world where you have the choice between $100/mo and $150/mo. There's a fairness question to be discussed (I personally think it's not unreasonable to have society-wide, fast, affordable, unlimited internet be the default) but there's also a value decrease there that deserves just as much attention as the fairness question. That decrease (and not the fairness issue) is where my frustration is directed.

Maybe in a market with real competitors. But like others have said, what usually happens is people with existing unlimited plans lose them overnight to ISP's with a monopoly in their area. Then, ISP's charge $50 more per month for them to get the service they already had.

The problem is your neighbourhood soccer moms have no idea what 1TB is, they just see that ISP1 costs $80 and ISP2 costs $130. You'd need all the ISPs to switch to this "discount" scheme all at once, which won't happen.

Basically every service provider in every industry uses the same "extra fees" model over "discount". From mobility networks to drycleaners to restaurants. Customers just aren't used to seeing things the other way around, and will immediately balk at the sight of higher initial prices.

I would be okay with that if the $50 discount were automatic, for any month where you stay under 1 TB.

Instead, you pay $80/month, plus a $200 penalty for each additional terabyte. You have to prepay $50/month to avoid the risk of a penalty. Comcast would rather make a bunch of money selling insurance, than put a fair price on data.