Netflix has issued a bold statement against metered usage charges imposed by Internet service providers (ISPs) in their 2010 fourth quarter letter to shareholders (emphasis theirs).

Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

I find this interesting since Netflix appears to be coming against a bit of a wall in Canada. Now that ISPs are allowed to implement metered billing they will likely make prices per GB prohibitively expensive to drive customers to their own video distribution channels. This will stifle competition from online service providers and increase the users reliance on their ISP for content delivery.

I don't have any issue with billing customers based on their usage, but the billing should at least match the costs of the ISP. In my mind ISPs should charge a fairly high connection cost to pay for the infrastructure and a low per GB cost for the actual usage of said infrastructure. Sadly, I think the trend in Canada is going to have low connection costs and high usage costs in the future since this will increase profit for the ISPs and discourage competition.