FWIW, I agree with the more skeptical comments... it's probably a hearing aid, or ice pack, or perhaps a heated stone. But that doesn't mean it's not a time traveler -- after all, common side-effects of frequent time travel include headaches, acute tinnitis, and loss of autonomic thermoregulation of the head and neck area.
kk site hacked!
Too bad, because it's a good question that deserves thought.
Assuming KK considers both critical dimensions of this phenomenon -- capacity and cost -- then the argument for inevitability actually hinges on the much broader and more controversial question of whether markets always work, i.e., whether (1) the emergence of competition and related market dynamics is inevitable in all digital technology product markets, and whether (2) those dynamics are certain to assure that such products will continue to be available to the rest of the market at prices that consistently track their ever-diminishing production costs.
Given the fact that pricing for many products and services that are subject to Moore's Law effects varies hugely by geography -- and the fact that many such variations cannot be explained away based on other factors (e.g., availability of other inputs, transportation costs, national regulations, etc.), it seems to me that the argument for inevitability (esp. continued inevitability) requires a level of optimism that borders on the irrational, a.k.a. "wishful thinking."
Far from being mutually contradictory, these concerns have actually been closely linked throughout history. The phrase "bread and circuses" is often associated with the fear of powerful elites manipulating pop-culture levers to control the masses, while the term "noblesse oblige" is common a shorthand term for the idea that powerful elites bear some higher responsibility for maintaining order in a world dominated by easily distracted masses.
Elite, high-brow HN readers wanting to know more might be interested in Eric Alterman's 2008 New Yorker article, "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper" (http://nyr.kr/11PL44), while the mass of low-brow HN readers might prefer the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).
That's a reasonable suggestion if you're willing to wait a couple of generations (or potentially forever) for any improvement in the situation.
The first complication with this suggestion is that in cases of exploitation of information asymmetries like this, you don't know what you don't know. It's nice that this issue is getting a little public scrutiny here now, but one has to wonder how long it's been going on? And getting an issue like this more widely recognized, to a point where demand for transparency would be self-sustaining, is likely to require a lot of someone's time an effort to bootstrap. If a subset of buyer/leasers were to take this on openly, real estate owners would almost certainly seek to punish them directly, in addition to mounting their own counter-education campaign >>> politicization. Alternately, some third party might sense a commercial opportunity here, e.g., to provide public education and neutral measurement services -- but that's the same sort of business model that makes "trial lawyers" so popular...
It's unrealistic to assume that commercial renters are going to be broadly responsive to individual demands for transparency before the overwhelming majority of real estate seekers permanently embrace transparency as a make-or-break requirement for buy/lease decisions.
If you have a practical application in mind (or something other than an urge to show off mathematical prowess), I'd recommend Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's new book, The Predictioneer's Game.