DO I DETECT A CHALLENGE?

No, no. You're right. They aren't stupid, they're just evil about their business, and either don't care about their public image or simply don't have to.

If GCI were a little smarter, or cared what people thought about them, they might do the following:

• Do like they did by warning customers of the oncoming change (they did so back in May). Only when they tell the people about it, also tell them "You have used X many gigabytes. Your new plan will be Y gigabytes." That way people can be cognizant of their usage before the overages go into affect.
• Agree to inform people via email, that is, direct communication, when they are about to reach overage charges, when they've reached them, and repeatedly after they're being charge them. Don't just stand up a website nobody will want to check (I could never remember my password when I was a customer. I have memorized at least 15 for personal and work reasons. It's more that I didn't care to, less than I forgot my password completely).
• Optionally give them options for shutdown once they've reached their bandwidth cap. Some people would be comfortable with this, or even welcome the shutdown in the interest of maintaining a budget.

I can give a company like AT&T some leeway for their similar actions on their cell network. They stopped selling "unlimited" bandwidth plans on their phones (though they weren't really unlimited to begin with) because the network on which they were working wasn't originally designed for such use. They agreed to put multiple billions of dollars into infrastructure, and offer cheap, easy ways to get information about your data usage ("an app for that").

You're definitely right. GCI is seeing this as killing two birds with one stone (solving their bandwidth issues and their hard-to-scale unlimited bandwidth plans), but they're going to make it much, much worse, I feel.