A metered download policy is not one that the average American is going to easily accept, but an metered upload policy would probably work quite well. The telecoms face several problems, all of which are of their own making. They do not charge enough money to sustain proper broadband services, and they do not impose sensible policies on extreme bandwidth users who are typically using bandwidth for illegal purposes.

In order to make VoIP services, and possibly at some point, a video-enabled upgrade, possible, there needs to be a sufficient amount of upload bandwidth to allow for audio equivalent to 32kbps MP3 to stream reliably. Nothing less than 128kbps would be enough to provide that, and ideally they should be providing at least 256kbps. 512kbps of upload bandwidth is more than enough for the current generation of home network applications that need a lot of upload bandwidth.

Since most a significant amount of uploading is illegal, telecoms and cable companies could penalize their illegal users by making a lower amount of upload bandwidth the norm, and then charging metered uploads on bigger connections since those are what P2P users often go for. If you want 1-2mbps of bandwidth, fine, but that's going to start costing you an additional $2/GB of bandwidth after your first 1GB of bandwidth use. 1GB of upload bandwidth at this point should be more than enough of a cap at such speeds to allow a VoIP user to use their service unmolested without making them subsidize the cost of the P2P free riders.

The telecoms and cable companies are victims of their desire to dominate at all costs because they know that they cannot make proper infrastructure investments with $15/month for DSL service or $25/month for cable service. They are going to have to accept the fact that metered bandwidth is unacceptable to the average broadband user, regardless of whether they use P2P applications for copyright infringement or not. People like me, who use it to buy off of the iTunes Music Store, are especially not going to accept this, and no amount of academic philosophical tripe is going to convince me that all of the blame falls in the laps of the file sharers when it has been obvious for a while that they have been courted by the broadband companies as they tried to build their services.

Besides, once the current generation of file sharers really get out into the workforce, they're not going to have the time to do these things. When you have a steady job, it's much easier to pay $15 for a CD than it is to spend a hour or two hunting down all of the tracks online. Not only that, but there is a certain degree of danger in doing this as an adult. Juries are not going to be sympathetic, even if you have kids, and employers would immediately look askance of anyone who continued to spend so much time taking content when they clearly had the money to pay for it.

Just wait a few more years, and a lot of this will probably start to correct itself. In the mean time, telecoms and content producers alike need to get out of their idealistic, philosophical world where they can rant to Congresscritters about these problems and actually find cost-effective means to fix them. The content producers would, unfortunately, be the most to suffer from this suggestion, if for no other reason than it would force them to develop more cost-effective delivery mechanisms so they could reduce their production expenses while producing content that is compelling enough to buy.