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Presumably in an effort to penalize serial P2P downloaders, Comcast is considering setting caps on the amount of content customers can download in a given month, and charging overage fees for users that go above the limit.

The preliminary limit would be 250GB per month. Comcast would allow one amnesty month per year, but would charge $15 for each 10GB over the cap customers use.

Comcast, which has a total of 14 million users, plans on testing out the new system in the coming months. According to them, only about 14,000 of their customers would actually be effected by the overage charges.

Comcast has been under fire for using tactics to break up P2P connections, as well as booting high consumption users for breaking through a seemingly arbitrary usage barrier.

Additionally, Comcast has promised to increase their enforcement of DMCA policies and completely eliminate any customers that receive four warnings about suspected piracy in a 12 month period.

Could this be the first step in a brave new world of United States ISPs charging customers based on usage volume? This brings up a lot of questions. What about unsecured wireless networks? What about a near-future when movies and tv shows are downloaded off the Internet in increasing numbers? What about pages that auto-refresh every five minutes, and advertisements and add to the usage statistics?

Thanks to Karl at dslreports.com for the story.

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