i) ISP's that plainly advertise "unlimited usage" means (in English anyway) unlimited, without restriction, without any limits.

Don't construe anything else from that unless you work for the ISP and are responsible for marketing said service and wish to declare a change.

Don't bother with the TOS either as far as their 'network protection' clauses are concerned. There's absolutely no specificity in it. It's too vague as to allow the ISP to interpret that in absolutely any way they want, and any restrictions/limits they derive and impose from those 'clauses' are simply an outright contradiction to what they advertise as "UNLIMITED"-- there's just no way around it. period.

We all know that they advertise as such to attract customers and in cases such as this, it's simply deceptive to continue doing so. This is tantamount to false and misleading advertising, aka a bait-n-switch. No more no less.

So they counted on only 1 out of 10 users per/node being the "heavy" user and they built the system with that in mind, not caring about his "full throttle" usage. It's fine for years until those numbers don't work anymore.

The problem is they want to have their cake and eat it too by now "LIMITING" those users who are "breaking" their numbers scheme so to speak, instead of upgrading their infrastructure to handle the changing demands of users.

Now instead of 1 out of 10, it's 5 out of 10. Well, that's life, too bad buddy. Get with the program and do the right thing by either:
a) upgrading infrastructure for the 'new math' OR
b) Immediately CEASE and DESIST advertising "UNLIMITED"

The old saying applies, "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen."

And save the "all you can eat buffet" analogies. If a *nationwide* food chain advertised all you can eat salads and it's stores began throwing out people, I guarantee you'd hear about on the nightly news.

A mom'n'pop Chinese restaurant just aint gonna get that kind of attention so they can get away with it, we all know this.

ii) (and more importantly I might add) ISP's don't give a good god damned whether the data represents legal OR ILLEGAL files, so preachers, STOP PREACHING.

All they care about is bandwidth usage, and the saturation of their now "ill equipped" networks.

I can't wait to see one year or so from now when real VOD streaming "DVD quality" movies (which is one of the all-time, long-awaited promises of "broadband") become popular, and now YOU-- PLUS 7 or 8 out of 10 "computer illiterate" users (not all those "warez" people that you shun) are streaming 2 hour movies which require 3-4Mbps of bandwidth.

Are you gonna cry then because a service you perhaps *pay* for is being throttled down to 128Kbps by your ISP? Are you gonna yell it's unfair because they still advertise their service as "UNLIMITED"?
Don't you dare say no.

You can bet your ass a situation of that nature would make the nightly news and would be a embarrassment for any large ISP.

What's going on here is just plain wrong, you all know it. It's immoral and unethical; it's reminiscent of a company that is more concerned with its' bottom line, pleasing investors, and making sure upper echelon management looks good and doesn't have to take a pay cut.

That unfortunately describes many companies and is the way it is, but defending them when they take actions in this manner is ludicrous and inappropriate to say the least.

I can't believe nobody here has yet spoken of measured service!
What pisses me off is the ISPs are avoiding the PR pain of making the obviously-gonna-happen-anyway move to measured service. There is no way to avoid the fact that data throughput usage costs money and people consume wildly different quantities of it.
This silly assed finger pointing at software tools, traffic shaping on the sly, judgements of who's doing what, yada yada. It's astoundingly bad management that providers are not implementing fixed-capped accounts with real-cost (which is cheap off-peak) overage charges.
It's a frikken limited resource network like any other and congestion problems are regionally limited to business and evening hours. We need pricing that pushes heavy users into the low-load periods. And we need the user base (that's us!!) to pressure our providers to do it now or we'll suffer untold months of this shaping, invisible caps on selected accounts, bait&switch marketing, and all the other bad relations crap people here are complaining about.