Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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The infrastructure over which that data travels isn't free. If you have a resource and it has any kind of scarcity, you want to tie consumption to the cost of producing more of it.
You can reduce the transaction cost -- reduce hassle for users using Internet service -- by not having a cap for them to worry about, but then you decouple the costs of consumption.
Soft caps, like throttling, are one way to help reduce transaction costs while still having some connection between consumption and price.
But point is, if one user is using a lot more of the infrastructure than any other is, you probably want to have that reflected in some way, else you're dumping Heavy User's costs on Light User.
I want to know where the storage tanks of gigabytes are hiding
They're behind the series of tubes.