voted ISPs were right
there are too many one sided comments instead of even understanding what is going on, all this is not airtel's idea, this came up in an international conference of mobile ISPs almost two years ago, had to dig it up but here it is, its like fakebook and google are parasites on the cellular network
Network investment: Apple, Google to pay - Times Of India
read article for reasons
I want your side of the argument to the question I'm raising below:
How can the ISPs claim to be "affected" by excess traffic when they charge for bandwidth already ? They greedily charge for every last GB (and then throttle speeds to very low levels) and all this is covered by the amount the user pays.
If a user has a low 1GB data cap and he exceeds it after using too much of facebook and youtube, (taking BSNL's example) he pays a good amount for every MB consumed and the ISP (BSNL) profits handsomely. So how can they expect additional money from facebook and youtube ? That is just plain greediness.
I like to use fun2sh's argument here. Autorickshaw or Taxi operators already charge high fares to ferry people to airports and/or malls. So claiming that high demand to get to airports and/or malls is affecting their infrastructure is ridiculous. If the KMs to travel is high the user pays that much as well.
From what I can see, the only way ISPs would be affected is if they are actually overselling bandwidth and popularity of certain sites is reducing their chance to oversell. And IMHO overselling without informing the users is unethical to begin with.