Since the successful days of Napster, file sharing of copyright-protected material — particularly in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks — has been a serious threat to the established business models of the content industry. There have been numerous discussions about the real impact. Scientific papers show the whole range from negative to positive effects, or no effects at all. In my opinion, there are effects, indeed. Some of them are positive as file sharing can expose new music groups and authors to an audience. And some effects are negative as existing copyrights are definitely infringed to a huge extent in the net.

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In 2008, a number of North American ISPs have publicly announced bandwidth caps, most prominently Comcast and AT&T. While this may seem as a step backwards for broadband customers at first sight, it actually is an improvement of the situation of the previous years with hidden and inconsistent caps. In fact, a true all-you-can-download plan across the entire customer base of an ISP at current price tags is commercially impracticable, despite the oft-lamented lack of a “real” flat rate by “consumer advocates”. Usually they try to drive their argument home by using everyday analogies such as monthly public transport travel passes, that also come with no usage limit. That analogy is of course totally flawed. Just as transportation authorities rely on the fact that physical presence in their vehicles is limited by natural means (Who on earth has allowed that camp site on our train?), every ISP has an oversubscription ratio without which no one would be able to pay for high-speed Internet access.

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