To clarify for the global audience: (most) broadband in Australia is metered, so back when ADSL started getting big, ISP's would offset 14GB bandwidth cap with 'free zone' content - data which is unmetered. This still continues today, the most recent competitive offering is unmetered Netflix - http://www.optus.com.au/netflix
Wow, there are actual countries with bandwidth cap and privileged content for Home Internet? Damn, I thought that was just the hypothetical scarecrow of NN defenders =/
eh. It's something that made sense over ten years ago. Very little content was hosted locally within Australia so most traffic had to go over the expensive links to other countries (which are obviously constrained in bandwidth). Privileged/unmetered content was often things like local Steam mirrors or whatnot which was closer to the user/ISP.
Now that more and more content is cached locally, there's less and less of a need for it both bandwidth caps and privileged content.
But then why didn't they give you a shitty bandwidth when you try to access such remote content? That would be fair game, instead of capping the global data transferred over a month..
Which, the latest news is that Netflix regrets signing these deals in the first place http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/04/netflix-regrets-signing-un...