You think data caps won't affect you?

Think again. This article from the website Techspot drives home the real issue with out current FCC / cable industry / Internet provider dynamic.

The data caps are punishing the group of people (of which I am one) called "cord cutters". These are folks who have left their cable TV subscriptions behind for a variety of reasons. There are two major reasons our family cancelled cable TV - cost and lack of use. By lack of use, I mean that we watched a handful of the channels to which we were subscribed and rarely viewed bundled-in channels on the various tiers we had to carry in order to see the few we wanted. That was tied directly to the cost factor. We could not justify $100 per month for the 4 or 5 channels we wanted.

So, we went our merry way with a data plan and Netflix and Hulu subscriptions. We could watch what we wanted when we wanted, so long as we could wait for our shows to appear on the service.

If you are streaming a lot of video though, you can easily hit lower-tier data package caps. I am convinced, as the article above states, that this is intentional with the aim to drive people back to cable TV packages.

What is needed is competition, cafeteria-style cable channel selection, and some governmental and regulatory backbone to make those things happen (in my humble opinion, of course).