With Comcast's new 250GB monthly cap going live tomorrow, industry journalist Om Malik drops us a line to note he's published a new white paper exploring how Comcast's decision will "become the symbol of a new Internet era." Malik is no friend to caps, previously arguing that a shift away from flat-rate pricing and toward caps and overages is the enemy of innovation. The white paper, co-written by former Bell Labs employee Muayyad Al-Chalabi, argues that carriers should spend more time improving their offerings, and less time making power users angry.The gist? About the only thing caps and overage charges are going to provide is higher prices for consumers. Using Time Warner Cable's current trial in Beaumont, Texas as a starting point (40GB cap and $1 per GB overages on the fastest tier), the paper explores how their pricing quickly becomes unreasonable:Not only is today's power user tomorrow's average user, but, the paper argues, they're an essential part of the content innovation and delivery hub. It argues that ISPs are better off embracing these users, and potentially caching hot (and obviously legal) content on the ISP head end. The problem is a lot of the hot content is pirated, and caching legit content often runs afoul of Hollywood, as IP Democracy points out.Of course the argument to cap or significantly reconfigure content distribution assumes that we can't just leave the existing flat-rate uncapped model in place. The current combination of flat-rate pricing, sensible upgrades and intelligent (and hopefully transparent) network management seems to be treating most ISPs' bottom lines rather well. But while carrier execs argue that looming congestion has made the current pricing paradigm irrelevant, others, like Andrew Odlyzko, argue said congestion is manageable with just a few modest capacity upgrades.