It seems the writer of the WAPO editorial does not believe the Telcomm companies are currently charging their end users a fee based on the amount of bandwidth used. He says “Asking all users to pay the same amount, regardless of how much data they download, hardly seems fair.”

Does anyone out their have unlimitted bandwidth access at home? I have never heard of such a service and if there ever was one I promise they did not stay in business very long.

Currently every dsl/cable internet service provider caps the available bandwidth of all their end users based on the amount paid (i.e. my cable provider has 3 bandwidth packages ranging from 384kb/s to 3mb/s).
Its quite a lot more money for the 3mb/s package. Now some users may pay for the 3mb/s package and not use its full bandwidth potential as often as other users. But thats all factored in when the pricing of the bandwidth packages is determined. Internet providers will increase infrastructure and prices for bandwidth as more and more users start taking full advantage of their 3mb/s cap. There is nothing in the law that prevents them from doing this in a fair and responsible manner (i.e. there is some regulation of the pricing I believe by local governments).

But obviously the Big Telecomms want to get money not only for the bandwidth they provide but also for the content for which they have done nothing to create. Why should the big Telecomms get money for content that they did not create and do not own or lease?

Providing the infractructure for the internet (what the big Telecomms do) is obviously important and its creators deserve to get paid for using their infrastructure. This is exactly what they are already getting paid for by their end users (whether its someone at home or a company at a Colocation center) and there is nothing to prevent them from putting in place a super bandwidth infrastructure and charging based on the end users bandwidth usage limits.

Providing content for the internet is as equally important as providing the infrastructure and its creators deserve to own and charge for their content however they see fit.

Its simply not fair to the content creators that they should pay a fee to the Telecomm company (infrastructure providers) in order to ensure quality delivery of content requested by end users. The end users already pay for the bandwidth they are taking up on the Telecomm companys network! Content providers should not have to pay extra simply because their content is traveling over a Telecomm companies network. The only way this could be made fair is if the end user pays nothing and the content provider pays for the bandwidth used. However, thats NOT the way it works and would be a stupid method to impliment.

You make some good points about content providers having to pay lots of money for bandwidth usage however this should not even be the concern of Telecomm companies who sell bandwidth to home users. The only people that should be concerned with the bandwidth used by a content provider is the company providing internet access to them which is generally at some huge Colocation facility with raised floors and rackmounted servers.