You seem to believe that it makes sense to buy a fixed guaranteed speed connection: I am starting from the assumption that no one would ever want that as it is inherently wasteful, and that any ISP that bills like that will be defeated instantly by an ISP that understands the idea of time sharing. As a user, I don't want to buy a connection that is guaranteed to be able to transfer a bunch of bits that lies dormant 99% of the time even when I'm actively browsing. However, when I am transferring something, I want to be able to take advantage of the faster rate. If you work out the math on some of the examples I've given in this thread (the people trying to transfer a minute of video over different time frames), you will see that "total number of bits" is actually a reasonable approximation and a fundamentally more reasonable approximation than buying fixed-size connections. I also have already stated there are more accurate billing models, but they start to look as complex as Amazon Glacier, and they require your browser to purposely rate limit themselves, which is tech we don't have deployed.

To address your comments on the pricing of "peak usage", metering is an approximation of your probability of increasing the peak load. This works better than you would expect (and even better I feel than for electricity) because bandwidth is designed to gracefully degrade: if it takes twice as long for me to download tiny files from the Internet I am unlikely to even notice. If the speed slows down tremendously, then rather than having to increase the price for that bandwidth, we simply decrease everyone's quality of service. This happens automatically and naturally, and while it might make you angry that you feel you were paying for something you weren't, what you were actually paying for was always this "probability distribution of speed assuming characteristic usage patterns under an expected load distribution". If you thought your flat-billed bandwidth was anything different you haven't thought through the economics enough: you would have to be paying much much more than you do under the current model, so anyone who actually billed like that would look so expensive as to be "insane". As people are already effectively paying more during peak load (as they are getting slower service for the same amount of money) that part is already actually fine: the issue is now how to deal with the fact that some people are more likely to increase load due to their usage patterns, and while switching to Amazon Glacier style billing would be "extremely accurate" just billing on total usage is fundamentally more accurate than a flat rate.

As for electricity, I covered this already many times: you are just wrong about the costs. The costs associated with power are dominated by the overhead of the plant, not the costs of generation. If you run a plant "below capacity" you are often better off just shutting it down, as the overhead is so high (you mostly do that in order to have "spinning reserve", so you can obtain more power quickly in the near future). If you are simply unwilling to believe that the cost of coal is largely irrelevant to our power costs, think about the economics of hydroelectric, which provides 16% of the world's power. In fact, electricity is mostly a game of "how many plants do I need to have built to have capacity to satisfy the load requirements", which is exactly the game with bandwidth. You don't have a blackout because someone ran out of coal: you have a blackout because more people are using power than is capable of being generated, we are using power faster than we can burn our copious available coal (which was probably more obvious back in the days when brownouts were more acceptable). If you are capable of generating power and you aren't, in a similar manner to bandwidth you are just "losing it": it isn't like we can store power at these kinds of levels; with some kinds of plants you get to save a little fuel, but again, that is a minor cost and doesn't apply to renewable sources, including hydroelectric.

All that aside, though: I want to point out that you are also not arguing for the current state of affairs. You also think people need to "pay for what we use", you just have a different concept for how that "usage" must be monitored. As it stands, most people only want to pay for "lots and lots of bandwidth at a flat price". They don't appreciate the idea of an incentive and they aren't modeling any costs to the ISP at all. In a way, and I think in a very fundamental way, what you are saying is actually agreeing with the overall point I was defending: the statement upthread that we need to pay for what we use to not run into network neutrality issues. If people who wanted to watch Netflix actually were paying much much more to get that kind of dedicated service than the people who were browsing web pages there would also not be this network neutrality issue. I argue that this would be a wasteful and expensive way to do the billing (as people browsing web pages--who would like their web pages to download quickly but also are downloading so dispersedly that time slicing is super efficient for them--either end up paying too much or having to live with downloading things needlessly slowly, and people who watch Netflix erratically are forced to spend on the same guaranteed bandwidth as someone watching it constantly despite they also being able to timeslice better) but at least your different way if billing is also a way of billing compatible with network neutrality.