Comcast Caps Bandwidth Usage, Customers Banned for Overage
 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in597032.shtml

Comcast claims that excessive usage by certain customers affects the service for others, but so far they've never showed any real proof of this and there are those that claim the cable companies have other motives. Yes, we all know that cable companies have a history of trying to control the Internet here in the US, but has anyone really thought why beyond just simply the profit they can make from bw usage and what that could mean for our industry? Comcast has a 250 GB cap, Time Warner and Frontier are now considering 40 GB caps. Of course there are other challenges the cable company would have to overcome to gain the total control they are looking for, but what if they were able to gain that control?

"control the internet"??
just as you pay for bandwidth on your dedicated server, they pay for your bandwidth to their backbones.
Your $50/month only gets you 250GB of bandwidth, deal with it

Of course that's what they want you to think, but why not charge more rather than ban you completely for service? Unfortunately your comparison to a hosting B2B company to the cable companies is not accurate in this case, although it's completely logical. It's what they want you to believe. Cable companies have been trying to legally control IPs for a while now, and of course it all comes down to profit, not that that's wrong.

this is targeting bit torrent traffic, by implementing reverse proxy technology they could have bit torrent traffic on the almost free local loop, instead of across their backbone.

They choose not to do this because they want to protect their cable tv monopoly.

Expect an anti trust lawsuit which would result in local carriers getting access to the local loop for free (and only paying for badwidth across the backbone) so far market competition will rule out or massive fines that will convince cable companies to implement reverse proxies themselves.

You've hit it on the nose, they're trying to stop the torrents. But are they trying to gain better control over other content distribution?