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Ever since ISPs and cellular service providers began introducing data caps, they’ve offered a familiar set of reasons to justify them. The biggest one is they’re supposedly necessary to bring a high quality of service (QoS) for everyone using the network at the same time. The other point that ISPs like to hammer is that caps are typically set well above the median use-point. Figures vary between providers, but it’s normal for a company to say that between 98% and 99% of its users never encounter a data cap.

Comcast may have inadvertently blown its own cover on these practices thanks to a tweet from the company’s VP of Internet services, Jason Livingood.

Livingood is only confirming what most of us have known for years, particularly as it pertains to cellular services — enforcing data caps is a terrible way to manage traffic, to the point that few networks would seriously propose using it. Data caps can only solve one problem: A tiny minority of users who soak up absolutely disproportional amounts of bandwidth. To be fair, Comcast may have had this usage in mind when it created a 250GB data cap in 2007 (it later updated this to 300GB). Back when average Internet use probably accounted for 10-15GB of data per month at most, a 250GB cap was enormous. Even gamers downloading a few dozen Steam games in 2007 might not have hit that level, and Comcast also says it allows a customer to hit 300GB 4x per year before it takes action against the account. The tiny number of people exceeding it were likely engaged in massive amounts of piracy, or running business servers off home connections.

Currently, Comcast doesn’t enforce its 300GB cap across most of the country — in the areas where the cap is enforced, customers are allowed to pay an additional fee ($10 per 50GB of data) rather than face a service shutdown. While we’re not fond of data caps as methods of network control, there are certainly far more draconian schemes out there.

The biggest problem with Comcast’s data caps these days is that the company hasn’t recalibrated them for the age of digital video. In fact, given the way Comcast now operates its own video-on-demand service, it has a perverse incentive not to adjust its data caps. Comcast’s Xfinity service, after all, doesn’t count against a customer’s data cap, whereas Netflix usage definitely does. In 2007, when Comcast didn’t own NBC/Universal and hadn’t branched out into TV, cable, and delivered services in the same fashion, this was less of a problem. As far as we’re aware, for example, the PS4 is still incapable of accessing HBO Go when using Comcast’s Internet service.

In the grand scheme of things, Livingood’s explanations aren’t going to change your opinion of Comcast or its services. But it’s nice to see someone in corporate reveal, however inadvertently, that the policies the company promotes as necessary for the health of the network are mostly about lining its own pockets. If Comcast wants to prove that it actually puts customers first, it should raise that limit to 600GB or more. This would still cut down on people using its services inappropriately, since the amount of network bandwidth required to distribute 4K content is much larger than the absolute increase required to stream it from legitimate services — but it would help prevent customers binge-watching Netflix from chewing through their bandwidth over the course of a few days.

One final point: When Comcast deployed its 250GB cap, it claimed less than one one-thousandth of its users actually exceeded that data usage. Today, according to BGR, the 300GB data cap is sufficient that 98% of Comcast users don’t exceed it. While 2% of one’s userbase is still a small fraction, the number of customers exceeding Comcast’s stated limits has increased by several orders of magnitude in just eight years. That has significant implications for long-term bandwidth consumption trends.