Earthlink Hits User With $24,000 Fine

from the ouch dept

Apparently Earthlink has a 500MB/month bandwidth limitation. Perhaps "Cannibal Harry" should have checked that out before posting a large movie/advertisement on his site. It was downloaded many many many times, causing Harry to surpass his bandwidth allotment by quite a bit, and Earthlink is now sending him quite a bill. What I'm wondering is why Earthlink doesn't have some sort of tripwire that causes them to contact the customer once the bandwidth allotment is passed. It seems a bit useless to let all that bandwidth go through, and then charge a $20/month user $24,000. Anyway, time to go check the bandwidth limitations on Techdirt...