It makes sense, at least to me. The bandwidth providers will become wholesalers of distribution, comparable in some respects to cable TV companies.
Here's the article, via Wired:
"ISPs have made a mint from all of the broadband upgrades that were made so that people could download more music faster, and there have been several suggestions made over the years that perhaps the easiest way to solve the digital music conundrum would be to let people download whatever they want, paying a fee to their ISP that would get divided among the rights holders.
This would allow people to keep uploading and downloading without worrying about impending lawsuits or starving artists. But the idea of allowing an agency to monitor the files we upload and download makes me a bit nervous (there's already enough of that going around as it is). A better approach might be to apply the same sort of thinking to an opt-in network, sort of like the original Napster. That way, only files shared through that network would be tracked for royalties, rather than every file sent to or from your computer."