“They’d say, look, it’s extremely expensive to build the hardware, lay down the wires, dig up the dirt required to provide high speed Internet access to Americans,” says Susan Crawford, a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School who argues the phone companies say they have caps so they can pay back all the money they pour into building the net. “We can only do that if we have enough money coming in to fund our operations.”

via Instagram’s privacy backlash, and the dirty secret of data caps | Marketplace.org.