It’s described as an “experiment,” but as most test-market situations go, if enough customers bite, the rest of us could be forced to dine from the same buffet.

Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner broadband service is testing a plan in Beaumont, Texas, that would meter customers’ Internet usage and then charge them based on consumption. In other words, if you live in Beaumont and you swap or download large files on a regular basis — video or music files, for instance — you could end up paying a lot more for Internet service than you’ve been used to. According to an article in the current Newsweek, Time Warner is proposing service plans for 5 gigabytes, 10 GB, 20 GB, and 40 GB of usage, with increasing prices as the size of the plan balloons. If people exceed their plans, like a cell phone bill, the extra charges really start to pile up. That’ll stink for people who like or need to tranfer large files. And with people sharing photos, videos, and downloading movies and TV shows much more frequently these days, that could mean a heck of a bite in the wallet for even average users. Time Warner claims the plan will get people to think more about their Internet use and avoid overtaxing its broadband system.

What the plan does avoid — so far — is a violation of Net neutrality. Right now the plan measures only how many bits a person uses, not where those bits are coming from or are going to. So Time Warner isn’t using the program to steer customers to, say, a less expensive carrier of the data, which would violate Net neutrality. However, an increasing part of the cable company’s business is offering video on demand, and local Internet companies are trying to get into the same business. So, as the Newsweek article points out, Time Warner can push more people to its own cable-based video-on-demand and away from the Internet providers because users who are concerned with exceeding their metered Internet usage by downloading a movie will instead pay Time Warner’s cable operation to rent the movie. That would be a situation where one company is exercising undue influence over a person’s use of the Internet. Whether that happens in Beaumont — or anywhere else if this experiment expands — remains to be seen.