Bandwidth is not unlimited, no, but it is very very cheap. At least for the telcos...
Remember, the reason why, 20-odd years after the breakup of AT&T in the MCI suit, we are back pretty much where we started (AT&T and Verizon/MCI and little else) is because in the "irrational exhuberance" of the internet bubble the Baby Bells and a bunch of other companies went hog wild investing in fiber optic infrastructure that is right now unused and returning zero income.
The real reason for non-cable ISPs want to "throttle" usage or go to proportional charges is that they see their fiber pipelines generating oodles of revenue for Google, MS, Apple, and the media companies while all they get is peanuts. So its not a scarcity issue but rather a gatekeeper issue. Just look at the fight over net neutrality and how the players line up to see what the *real* fight is about. Google makes billions of bucks off the net and they pay nothing to the ISPs that deliver their product.
To the ISPs, it looks like they own a toll road that truckers get to use for free and are clogging it up. So they want the truckers from google, MS, Apple, etc, to pony up a cut of their revenue as tolls.
But since Congress in their finite wisdom is protecting the Googles, ebays, and Apples of the world, the ISPs can't get their pound of flesh from the providers. So now they're looking at the consumers, figuring that if they can't get consumers to pay, they'll get them to cut back on usage and hurt the providers *that* way, thinking they can force them to negotiate by hurting us.
So yes, short term there is the potential for consumer pain but long term the ISPs (telcos in particular) would be shooting themselves in the foot if they go out of their way to discourage the use of their core product.
Cablecos have video broadcast revenue and their local monopolies to fall back on if bandwidth demand slacks; the telcos have nothing else, bandwidth *is* their product.
Sooner or later Congress will get out of the way and allow the ISPs to collect revenue from the providers just as cablecos collect revenue from even the OTA broadcasters. Its simply a new era and a new business and there are precious few agreed-upon rules on who is responsible for what and with all that money in play and politicians so cheap to buy it is simply easier to make the fight political than to learn to share the bounty like good little children. As bandwidth usage expands those issues will get settled and reasonable rates (and terms of use) will be agreed-upon for all players . Eventually.
Just not tomorrow.
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