Too cheap to meter

Too cheap to meter refers to a commodity so inexpensive that it is cheaper and less bureaucratic to simply provide it for a flat fee or even free and make a profit from associated services.

The phrase was coined by Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who, in a 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers, said: It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.

[1][2]It was this statement that caught the eye of most reviewers and was the headline in a New York Times article covering the speech, subtitled "It will be too cheap for our children to meter, Strauss tells science writers.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission itself, in testimony to the U.S. Congress only months before, lowered the expectations for fission power, projecting only that the costs of reactors could be brought down to about the same as those for conventional sources.

[10] He goes on to briefly recount the development of fission, noting a letter from Leo Szilard of sixteen years earlier where he speaks of the possibility of a chain reaction.

"[4] Strauss viewed hydrogen fusion as the ultimate power source and was eager to develop the technology as quickly as possible and urged the Project Sherwood researchers to make rapid progress, even suggesting a million-dollar prize to the individual or team that succeeded first.

For instance, landline (and cable) internet bandwidth is now often billed on a flat monthly fee with no usage limits, and it is predicted that the introduction of 5G will do the same for mobile data, making it "too cheap to meter.