Fair use policy

How it works

Unlimited rarely means unmetered. The policy names a threshold or reserves judgment. A 100 GB cellular download can drop to a crawl under fair use. A business plan with a stated cap is clearer.

A field team on unlimited home broadband uploads 40 GB a day for a week. The ISP cuts the up rate to 5 Mbps. Deliveries miss the evening window. A business circuit with a stated 100 Mbps commit does not do this quietly.

How it differs

Fair use is not a published numeric quota, though it behaves like one after the fact.

You often learn the number when you hit it.

Ask before you design a workflow on an unlimited consumer plan.

On the ticket

• The practical close is a log line: time, actor, byte count, result.
• Without that line the transfer is a story.
• With it, the next person can see whether this door did what the ticket claimed.
• If the path is shared, say so in the partner profile so a later change does not silently pick a different limit, key, or region.
• On a real ticket, write down the door, the byte count, and the clock.
• For fair use policy, that means naming the host or bucket, the expected size, and the time the other side must have a complete file.
• A progress bar is not that record.
• A 200 response that arrives before the complete call is not that record.
• If a retry is allowed, say how many and whether it resumes.
• If a person must approve the send, name the person.
• Partners who receive fair use policy files should match on hash or size before they import.
• A same-length corrupt file passes a size check and fails a hash.
• Keep the published hash off the only channel an attacker can edit, or treat it as a corruption check rather than a substitution check.
• When the path changes, new key, new region, new cap, update the profile the same day so the next run does not use a stale limit.