If Elon Musk has anything to say about it, we’ll have global satellite broadband equivalent to fiber. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-17/elon-musk-and-spacex-plan-a-space-internet

That’s literally thinking outside the box. It may be rather difficult for cable operators to argue in court that one stream of bits is fundamentally different than another stream of bits. Bits is bits, but trusting that to the courts is a crapshoot. Things get really murky when your wireless data and voice jump onto the wifi router connected to your cable modem. Bits that are regulated under one regime suddenly end up under another.

The 300GB cap reminds me of the Alternative Minimum Tax. It was sold as a, “We’re only targeting the top 1% of taxpayers,” but it was never indexed for inflation, so today, it snags a large percentage of taxpayers. Will Comcast adjust their cap for “inflation?”

I don’t know what the solution is here because either outcome may not be ideal. I don’t think preventing a cable provider from creating their own streaming service would pass constitutional muster, so you’re left with preventing them from favoring it over competing services. That still doesn’t do away with the data cap and given the irritating fact that each streaming service has different and often exclusive content, you’re left subscribing to most, if not all, of them if you want to completely get rid of cable TV, which gives you several subscription fees and the ever-present danger of busting the cap. Oh, and you still have to rig up an antenna if you want your local over-the-air channels. We could prevent the pipe provider from inhibiting competition and innovation, but the overall user experience may still get more frustrating with no one-box-for-everything solution.