Who knows how well it would go over? I would be pleased to pay a metered rate, provided that the metering was standardized and easy to understand - like the electrical meter outside my home - and the pricing was fair. I would also expect there to be no speed tiers; everyone using a service gets the same nominal speed. I would not be interested in purchasing e.g. bandwidth blocks with f-you overage fees like what we used to have (still have? I don't do mobile data) with mobile carriers. That, I agree, would not go over well.
I think that the real problem is not perceived acceptance by customers, but that moving to metered billing makes the service look more like a utility. If I were running an ISP I would want to do everything I could to keep people from equating my service with water or electricity.
There's an efficiency argument against metering. Bandwidth is "free" unless service is near capacity, so introducing pricing that discourages use during that off-peak period can create needless problems. So maybe you only want peak-period pricing (kind of like how some cell providers give free minutes on nights and weekends).
This is already done at commercial providers. Those of us who operate networks are pretty well used to paying monthly rates based on 95th-percentile bandwidth utilization.
Internet service is metered. It's just metered in very large chunks instead of by the penny. Try going over your monthly bandwidth cap and see what happens.
The ISPs have total control over their subscribers' connection fees. If they set them too low to make a profit,* then they need to raise those fees and live with the consequences, not go trying to extort profits from new sources.
*I don't believe for an instant that the major ISPs are actually hurting, mind you. They just see an opportunity to make even more of a profit.
Ha! Sorry can't read statements like that without laughing/cringing. We all lost our "unlimited pipe" years ago .. in fact I'd argue we never had it in the first place only that the technology prevented us from hitting our limits in the early days.
That's one form of metered pricing, but I'd argue that granularity of a month is much too coarse to make much sense form a network utilization perspective. As I've said in other comments, pricing based on 95th percentile circuit utilization (which is common among commercial ISPs) is a much more practical way to balance efficient utilization with incremental cost.
For phones the demand is very different: a subscribers connection is either in use or not. When it is in use, it typically consumes no more than 64kbps at most. And it is easy to model expected peak demands in normal (non-disaster) scenarios because everyone that people might be calling tends to have a fairly low number of inbound connections, so the total peak bandwidth usage is still quite small - miniscule by todays standards.
When you're paid per subscription, and you at most carry 64kbps through a small local area before long distance fees kick in, it works.
Even so, in Europe (and I believe most of the world) landline usage is metered. It is the US model of free local calls that is unusual.
It would probably be much better if internet service was metered but it would not go over well after we all have been used to the unlimited pipe.