From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Get ready to pay for your data usage.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator and internet provider,

an owner of NBC Universal, decided this week to

begin the process of preparing you psychologically. Concast has had infamous dustups with its

internet subscribers. In 2007, it was the subject of an FCC complaint that it was secretly

throttling the bandwidth of heavy downloaders. After that fight was resolved,

the company began to cap its user's data usage to ensure that they wouldn't download too much.

But on Thursday, Comcast announced that it would lift the cap and instead begin charging

users whose data use surpasses a certain amount, sort of like your cell phone's data plan.

The thing is, only a very, very few of us are ever likely to exceed that amount.

This is, for now, for most of us, an academic exercise.

But Comcast is preparing the ground for us to think differently about the way things work.

Brian Stelter reports on media for the New York Times. Welcome to the show.

Sure.

First of all, let me ask you, as goes Comcast, so goes the rest of the industry?

That's oftentimes true, because it's one of the largest providers of TV and Internet in the country.

Other companies take

their lead from Comcast, and Comcast oftentimes sends signals about where they believe the

industry is going. In this case, they're not quite first to say that we should be paying

based on how much we consume. And of course, it's something that wireless companies already do.

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