> There is something unique in character to that Superbowl experience that is making it fundamentally more expensive to the world than other possible uses of bandwidth, and that needs to be modeled as a cost to someone.

If this was actually a problem there is a much better way to model it than metering: Sell different speeds at different times of the day. Instead of selling a connection which is allegedly 100Mbps all day and all night, sell a connection which is 1Mbps during peak hours and 100Mbps off peak. Then sell a more expensive connection which is 10Mbps during peak hours and 100Mbps off peak, etc.

This is a much better mapping to costs than metering because it takes into account the persistence of capacity expansions. With metered billing, the people who only tune in on Superbowl Sunday aren't actually paying as much as their usage is requiring capacity to be expanded. Peak usage that day is higher than peak usage any other day so more capacity was needed just for the day, but once built it sticks. Just paying the “normal” metered pricing that day would let them off the hook for their contribution. But increasing the price to the accurate level, putting the whole capacity expansion cost onto that one day, could create such high prices that customers would revolt, and would probably make live streaming of popular events uneconomical. The better solution is to make the correct people pay (namely those who buy the plan with sufficient peak hours performance to play the stream), but pay by subscribing to a plan that spreads the cost out over the whole year and in exchange provides superior peak usage performance all year to those paying for the capacity expansion that allows it.

> The reason we don't have horribly wasteful electronic devices is partly because they would cause electricity bills to go up for the people using them. If you had a washer/dryer that used a thousand times more electricity than other appliances you owned, or you had a holographic television that used a thousand times more electricity than a lightbulb does, you would start to limit how often you washed clothes and watched holovision, and this would be a good thing: it would lead to market incentives to create similar devices that used less electricity.

The incentive exists without metering. If you had a version of Netflix that used a thousand times more bandwidth than the existing one, you would need a connection which is a thousand times faster in order to use it. You can even get such a connection: Just pay AT&T or Level 3 to dig up the street in front of your house and install 10 or 100Gbps fiber just for you. They'll do it for the right price, but that price is prohibitive for pretty much everyone. Which is why Netflix doesn't even offer to stream uncompressed 4K 3D video at ~10Gbps per stream.

You're also making the assumption that the price of metering would be high enough to have a significant deterrent effect on usage. But accurately priced metering probably wouldn't. The significant majority of an ISP's expenses are not strongly correlated with the amount of data transmitted. They're paying accounting, customer service, marketing, linemen to repair weather damage, property tax, electricity, etc. Even a significant proportion of expansion-related costs are uncorrelated with future consumption, because by the time you break ground to do any expansion whatsoever, the digging becomes a sunk cost and the cost to install 2X or even 10X as much fiber into the open hole is extremely modest. Expanding capacity by 500% can cost in the same ballpark as expanding capacity by 50%.

The marginal cost of increased usage that could be deterred by accurately priced metering, i.e. the cost to the provider of usage increasing by say 55% instead of 65% over the same period, is so small that trying to measure it isn't even worth doing. It may even be zero – upgrading links from 1Gbps to 10Gbps gives you ten times as much capacity regardless of how much you actually needed.

The concept of trying to conserve bandwidth is the application of false analogies. It's not like electricity; there is no generation cost. Bandwidth is use it or lose it. If you're paying for a high speed plan and then not using it, that isn't the fault of someone paying for a high speed plan who is using it. A single user using more than average costs nothing because it isn't enough to require an overall capacity upgrade; only the average user increasing average usage does, and if that happens to a sufficient degree then all it means is the average user will have to pay a higher rate. People who don't use as much and don't want to pay as much can buy slower connections – but if it turns out that the actual cost of increased usage is a sufficiently small proportion of the cost of providing internet service that slower connections cost almost as much as faster connections, that's hardly the fault of people who send more bits.