The influence of payment options

Over the years, Internet access has been billed in a number of ways, which does influence user behaviour more than perhaps one realizes.

1) by time unit: Nervous high speed clicking.

2) by data transferred (no MB included, high price per MB): Minimalistic usage, this btw what the mobile industry has been selling for years, and somehow they wondered that nobody bought their cool 10 bucks a MB GPRS service. Quelle surprise.

3) by data transfered (no MB included, resonable price per MB/GB): Usage, but one tries to figure how much it will cost you, e.g. one avoids youtube, video downloads.

4) by flatfee (by time unit day, week or month): you basically don´t need to figure out what will it cost me.

5) by flatfee with data limits, this can be combined with reaonable or unreasonable overage fees, or non-monetary punishment e.g. limit the download speed to a crawl, so that you will hate yourself.

Sadly, why 4 is the desireable (from the customer PoV), the reality is that in practice some form of flatfee with some punishment is what one gets currently.