alt Hacker NewsYou don't pay for capacity, you pay for an interface. Paying for capacity is what API keys are for.
Similarly, on a home internet connection you might pay for a given size of pipe, but most residential ISPs don't allow running publicly accessible servers on your connection because you'll typically use way more of the bandwidth.
If that same internet provider has caps on how much bandwidth I can use every 5 hours and total on a weekly basis, then yes, I pay for capacity.
That argument would have been valid when the 5 hours blocks were unlimited in the beginning.