What's old is new again. :-/ Back in the days of dial-up Internet access the phone companies used to complain about tying up POTS lines for extended data sessions. I seem to remember waaay back something about phone company rules prohibiting customers using profanity during a phone conversation (although maybe that memory is an artifact of college excesses). The ideas being promoted by the phone companies for network usage would be like them charging different rates depending on the types of phone calls you want to make ... like charging more to place a 20-minute data call vs a 20-minute voice call.
The dial-up issues were probably justified, because the infrastructure was designed with a completely different usage model. In the case of data networks the capacity planning is typically based on a 95th percentile basis, and it's entirely possible that the new web apps are skewing the loads in ways that weren't anticipated. But with data networks when the capacity is exceeded you don't have to completey redesign and rebuild your infrastructure, you have to add more capacity. That costs money, but throughout the system the costs are determined on the basis of capacity or load requirements. So theoretically as a user/server contributes more to the load on the system their costs increase proportionately and that money eventually trickles through the system to the network providers that are carrying the load and have to build out their capacity to support it.
Essentially we're all paying for bandwidth, at both ends. The network bits and bytes don't care what type of data they're carrying. It works the same regardless.