The final nail came from Chuck Schumer.

Time Warner's move is essentially an admission that their plan to charge Internet customers was nothing short of a public relations disaster. Customers complained, they organized, and last night, Sen. Schumer made the decisive phone call to CEO Glenn Britt.

Time Warner executives stood near Schumer when he made the announcement as he stood in front of their Rochester hub. Yet they wouldn't answer questions on camera. It says, "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing."

Sen. Schumer suspects that Time Warner trotted out the ill-fated plan here because of a lack of sizable competition. Schumer says consumers view Frontier's service as slower than Time Warner's, and Verizon doesn't yet offer its service in Rochester. Schumer says Time Warner was taking advantage of a near monopoly.

Sen. Schumer says he will sit down with Time Warner corporate heads before any new plan is rolled out. It seems they will try it again, given that their statement says that they'll roll out new bandwidth measurement tools to help consumers understand how much internet they use. Time Warner's plans to test tiered internet billing have now been dropped in all three of the cities they were trying it in.