Fortunately technology is advancing far more rapidly than government attempts to stamp on it, and government (or non-government) attempts or not people will find the best deal they can. Such meddling and artificial market pressures may in fact spur innovation, but I wouldn't bet on it. The history of commercial codes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_%28communicatio... is an interesting one, though. Charging per length? Send compressed messages. Not compressed enough? Create the theory of compression and compress them even more. Print out shared code books to compress beyond the minimum for a raw message. What would Netflix do if the cost of paying for content transfer over wire suddenly exceeded the cost of other alternatives? They'd probably pursue those alternatives.
More interestingly, with WebRTC and P2P in the browser, it's really only a matter of time until they won't know who the original sender is anyways. Everyone will become a sender and these telcos worrying about too much content are right back where they were.
P2P basically nullifies the sender pays argument. If the sender pays economic model prevails and I were netflix, I would immediately invest in a netflix client that is P2P, so that I am only really paying more for less popular content and any sufficiently popular content is self-sustaining.
I'm generally all for any regulation that ends up spurring more P2P solution, but the problem we then end up with, and is a serious one, is that less popular (or simply not-yet-popular) content becomes too expense to be sustainable and we end up with less content to choose from. The long tail will either cost more or be discontinued.
No, the concept is that the 'sender' has to send less because the receiver takes some of the load. What ends up happening (for content with enough viewers) is that, on average, you transmit as much data as you receive, so the cost returns to being split evenly. Only now the actual usage is split evenly.
I think the "technology is advancing more rapidly than governments' attempts" works well when the technology allows people the communicate much easier with each other, and then it makes it easy for people to group and create extremely massive protests against such attempts.
I think this part works a lot better than what you must be thinking - that we'll keep escaping governments through technical stuff, such as building darknets and whatnot. The problem with that is that while we may succeed in creating such solutions, it still ends up ultimately worse for us. Because now everyone has to become more technical to use these darknets, or to become anonymous, or to share stuff with each other, which will all be much harder than it is now on the Internet.
This is why the solution should always be a political one, and not a technical one, because if we lose on the politics side, it means things will get worse for us from a user experience point of view, and it will only be a short-to-medium term solution anyway, until they come after that solution, too. So instead of trying to always be one step ahead through technical means, we should try and stand up for our rights from the beginning, when it's all starting, and make sure that the political solution lasts for decades until they try again.
Here's an example. Instead of letting them pass laws that allow for warrantless monitoring of e-mails, which would then mean we'd all have to learn to use encrypted anonymous e-mail messages (which sounds like a pain), we should protest to create a law that demands warrants for that. And that's pretty much what we've achieved with the new ECPA now. While not always possible, the political solution is so much better than the technical one, and we should always strive to solve these problems through politics first.
