Canada Forces Pay-by-the-Byte Metered Internet on Unhappy Citizens

While Egyptians were enduring an internet blackout in recent weeks, Canadians were--and still are--dealing with an Internet problem of an entirely different degree: the onslaught of metered Internet usage. Citizens are raising their voices in protest, though, and are fighting back against the "Internet-attackers." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve4bQO3S9X8 Also called "usage-based billing," metered Internet appears to be bad news for Canada's smaller Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but good news for the giants like Bell. Smaller ISPs were profitable because they could rent bandwidth from the larger companies and only pay according to the number of customers they had, and not based on how heavily those customers used the Internet. But a recent decision from the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is allowing these larger companies to charge according to the number of gigabytes used. So far, the story is playing in a backwards David-and-Goliath way in terms of how it's affecting smaller ISPs: