I feel like you ignored the brunt of my argument and demonstration for my statements, and instead are just arguing with a soundbite from my comment. I will try again, maybe more explicitly: bandwidth is actually very much like electricity because both have a peak capacity, a noticeable cost of equipment maintenance, but very little incremental cost; you don't experience a blackout or a brownout because you ran out of coal: maybe that will happen in the distant future, but today the problem will be that the immediate amount of power needed by the users exceeded the maximum capacity of either the plant burning coal (which likely has lots of coal in reach that it can't burn fast enough) or at best the rate at which you can remove it from a mine to get it to the plant.

Now, if you could somehow cheaply lay cable and setup cell towers constantly and everywhere, and if they didn't degrade or get obsoleted by new standards, sure: maybe you could keep building out infrastructure and accumulate capacity to handle increasing usage forever. But finding places to put cell towers is hard, laying new cable is destructive, and the reality is that you have to maintain and upgrade your infrastructure constantly. The peak load that can be supported is thereby a key cost, and there should be incentives for everyone to keep that cost low.

As for your "peak usage is contributed to by everyone equally" assertion, I just don't understand why this is not clear: if the Superbowl being streamed is the highest usage load, then if you are watching the Superbowl (or doing something else equally bandwidth intensive at that exact moment) you contributed to the max total peak usage for the month in a way that someone who wasn't using the Internet that day did not. I just don't see how you can argue against that: it seems self-evident :(. Some people are simply going to be using more bandwidth than other people during the peaks (and some services are going to encourage people to use lots of bandwidth, especially simultaneously, while others do not.)

To put this another way, you are saying that my grandmother sending a few emails every month is contributing to peak usage as much as someone who streamed the Superbowl... or that someone who only uses Netflix at 3am (or whatever the most non-peak time happens to be) is also contributing to peak usage as much as someone who streamed the Superbowl... at some point this argument becomes gratuitously preposterous. If everyone were my grandmother then the world would need fundamentally less networking infrastructure to keep up with demand: she should not have to bear the cost of people who insist on streaming the Superbowl live over the Internet.

And again, with the concept of "wasteful", this should also be really obvious: let's say the there are two ways to steam the Superbowl--two codecs that could be used to compress the stream--and one uses half as much bandwidth as the other. This one decision affects peak usage more than any other decision: someone somewhere has to bear the price of this decision, and to make the wrong choice is "wasteful". If someone insists on using the worse codec (or in a network neutral "bill the users" model, chooses to use services that employ the worse codec), they should somehow be forced to bear the infrastructure buildout and upkeep cost of that decision.

Maybe you could work this out with some math: can you demonstrate how all these different kinds of users are contributing equally to the peak load? You seem to believe that this should be as obvious to me as I think this should be to you. Whether you measure a ratio of the peak or the probability of increasing the peak or even metrics that are purposely flawed in an attempt to force equality, like "whether the user was using any bandwidth at all during the peak", any and all analyses show that the person watching the Superbowl streaming in this example are contributing to the peak much more than my grandmother is, much more than someone watching Netflix in the middle of the night is, and even more than someone using a "less wasteful" codec to perform the same activity is... please show me what metric you are using where these people ally work out to "contribute equally".