For those of us who are Americans, isn't it amazing how the companies that provide us with access to the internet are pretty much among the most hated companies in our country? I feel like I'd rank them almost up there with Halliburton, Sodexo and Blackwater.
First of all they are incredibly expensive. They try to actively create worse experiences for their customers. Forced inclusions of apps on android phones on mobile carriers. A comcast rep wanted to install a browser toolbar on my computer. Vague billing that leads to sticker shock. $0.25 per tiny little text message, really? I paid next to nothing to post this comment on HN, but had I posted such large amounts of text via a text message, it would have cost a lot of money.
Talk to them on the phone and they try to sell you things you don't need. Like one time I wanted to get HBO, HBO costs $15 a month, period, but when you talk to them on the phone they wont tell you that unless you ask a specific question, they'll tell you about their bundles which will cost you hundreds of dollars extra. This is a really scummy thing to do. They know the person who contacted them only wants HBO, but then they sell them something way worse they didn't want.
Collusion with illegal federal programs that involved lying to congress, lying to our public representatives. These companies are filled with scum from top to bottom. The people that you deal with in the stores, the people that decide which phones you can buy at their store and what they have on them, the people you talk to on the phone, the executives. It must be like working for a tobacco company, once you're willing to work at such a place the culture just destroys your integrity or something. I have no idea. I even still considerably distrust tmobile, even though they seem to be trying to change things.
The reason they're so hated is a perfect combination of Service Quality x Frequency. The service quality is horrendous and intentionally misleading, for all the reasons you've stated, among others. But that's just the half of it. We, as consumers, have to deal with these companies on a regular basis. We get their crazy bills every month. We get outages, and we have to navigate a labyrinth of bullshit to get them serviced. We get their up-sales calls every month, despite repeatedly asking to be removed from whatever hell-spawned list we're on to get them. Every now and then, we have to deal with their customer service reps on the phone.
The point is, we have tangible, direct experience with these companies every year. By comparison, our experiences with the folks at Halliburton, Monsanto, BP, etc., are indirect. We might rely on their products and services, but we don't deal with these companies directly. This makes them more of an abstraction in our minds. Many of us despise that abstraction, but it remains an abstraction, all the same.
If you look at polls of the most hated brands and companies in America, many of them are brands and companies we engage with personally and frequently. Airlines, credit card companies, cable and ISPs, cellular companies, insurance providers, etc. Companies like Blackwater (or whatever it's currently calling itself) don't make those lists, because aside from hearing about them in the news, most people don't have any direct experience with them.
isn't it amazing how the companies that provide us with access to the internet are pretty much among the most hated companies in our country? I feel like I'd rank them almost up there with Halliburton, Sodexo and Blackwater.
Blackwater is a company whose employees kill people. Sometimes civilians. And sometimes for no reason.
The incident for which the men were tried was the single largest known massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of private U.S. security contractors. Known as “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday,” operatives from Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians at a crowded intersection at Nisour Square on September 16, 2007.
If, after reading this, anyone is still nodding their head and entertaining the idea that their internet company is in the same league as Blackwater, then they have some pretty strange value judgments.
> If, after reading this, anyone is still nodding their head and entertaining the idea that their internet company is in the same league as Blackwater, then they have some pretty strange value judgments.
We can get really philosophical about this if you want. Is it worse to kill 1 person or dismember 100? Is it worse to bankrupt one person or steal $1 from a million? If the perpetrator is a single entity, then courts have precedents to punish appropriately. But what if it is a systemic theft where a million people are involved in making hundred million others suffer slightly? Is that somehow "less wrong" than 5 people killing 25?
What if one of the hundred million suffering slightly, missing school work, or work assignments because of bandwidth theft, and loses grade or job and consequently, a chance at productive life? Every time my home internet goes down, I lose a chance at being productive, meeting my deadlines, and making money.
We have started placing a lot more importance over the last few decades on violent crimes committed against a few over white collar crimes that marginally impact millions. Violent crimes against a few will never stop as long as humans continue to be humans. However, by excusing the white collar crimes that steal pennies from everyone, we are slowly chipping away at our standard of living. Banks charge fees incorrectly and get away with it. Cellphone companies do the same. Insurance companies do the same. Since nobody in a large company can be held guilty for distributed crimes, every large company engages in them without consequences.
An EDI error at my wife's health insurance company caused a refusal in her invoice. The doctor's office said "Sorry, the insurance company said they won't cover it." Only after I read through the fine print and contacted all parties involved, did we find out that it was an automated electronic processing error instead of an outright denial by a human or algorithm. Nobody got blamed for this. There is nothing I can do about this to prevent future instances. And I am 100% certain, there are many many many others who have just paid the $200 without putting up a fight. And then someone of them stop getting the treatment because $200 is too much, and then suffer despite having insurance.
You might still put outright murder in a different league than bandwidth theft, but my point is that scale matters and we continue to ignore it because we solely look at individual instances and go "Pfft! It's only bad 10% of the time for 5% of the base so who cares?", ignoring that the base is 100 million people.
This should be the top comment overall. The mods should sym-link it into the root thread or something.
From a leadership perspective, understanding that seemingly minor decisions have can horrible consequences, and how often that happens, is what makes good leaders.
Here's one: Bancroft Hall at the US Naval Academy lacked air conditioning until 2004. Even after plans were made, the funding was cancelled because alumni complained that "it would make the students weak".
One admiral had the temerity to re-fund the work and got A/C installed. In reality, not only did performance improve, 25% fewer midshipmen got sick throughout the summer months. A total of over 500 fewer diagnoses. Multiply that by the last 10 years, and you're quite possibly saving a life in that 5000 illnesses.
The medical director's assessment at the time: the students were probably enjoying improved immune function due to better sleep.
When you're in charge and trying to save money for your Ferrari, don't forget that life sucks at the bottom. Maybe you should spend that money on bigger monitors for your help desk people instead.
Because, in truth, you're not successful only because of your hard work and personal risk and sacrifice early on. Plenty of people worked hard, took risk, and made sacrifices to make the organization what it is. You just won the CEO lottery.
"A total of over 500 fewer diagnoses. Multiply that by the last 10 years, and you're quite possibly saving a life in that 5000 illnesses."
Not to mention the delays in people taking time to get diagnosed, extra costs in diagnosing, delay in treating more serious complaints, and the cumulative effect of all of that over years.
Well said! From a purely utilitarian perspective it could easily be argued that large scale corporate collusion is worse than the deaths of a few individuals.
When looking at which company is more hated in the US I would completely agree that ISPs are towards the top of that list. Not only because of their large scale poor performance and price gouging but also because unlike Blackwater many people are directly affected.
If AT&T wasted just 8 hours from everyone in America, that's about 270000 person-years of lost time.
If Xe/Blackwater outright murdered 20 people, wasting every moment they might have had for the rest of their lives, that would only be about 1000 person-years of lost time.
I know that AT&T has wasted more than 8 hours of my time so far, I expect them to waste more of it in the future, and I'm not even a current customer.
If I were running life through a performance profiler, companies like AT&T and Comcast are short routines, frequently visited, inside inner loops, whereas companies like Xe might have a very expensive operation that is seldom performed. Total impact is severity multiplied by frequency.
Logically, we should be focusing on improving the customer experience from companies with the broadest surfaces exposed to the public. Instead, we heavily weight severity and heavily discount frequency. We spend billions fighting terrorism, and all but ignore crimes that collectively cost us all many times that amount in lost equity.
We know this is ridiculous. We always optimize our inner loops before messing around with once-run functions. But other people are not like us. They have illogical, emotional preferences and biases, and never realize that the most evil companies in the world never seem all that bad to one individual, in isolation.
Consider for a moment a cost-cutting measure undertaken by many companies. They choose to titrate their customer service staff such that none of their employees are ever idle while on the clock. The tradeoff there is that this means that customers who need something must always wait a certain amount of time before they can take care of their business. That's wasted time. (And they avoid hiring additional employees to do it, which may or may not be economically neutral, depending on how you look at such things.) They make a conscious decision to externalize some of the costs of providing customer service to the customers themselves. You pay with your time.
That 15 minutes waiting in line at the only open checkout register in a row of 20 point-of-sale terminals is a cost that you pay, that does not appear on your sales receipt. The 30 minutes spent waiting on hold for a call center employee is a cost you pay, that does not appear on your billing statement. The natural opponent to these incursions is the one entity that people created to ensure that costs and benefits for the individual could be subordinated to the collective cost and benefit to the whole--the government. But being composed of individuals, it suffers from the same biases: severity is more important than frequency.
Nickel-and-diming is therefore a profitable strategy, and we will continue to see it, and be diminished as a result. I see no solution that is both ethical and able to be accomplished by a minority of the consumer base from where I'm sitting.
What if one of the hundred million suffering slightly, missing school work, or work assignments because of bandwidth theft, and loses grade or job and consequently, a chance at productive life?
Really? We're now calling degraded bandwidth or service outages excuses for an unproductive life? What about the missed appointment because of a traffic jam? Are we making that the city planners' fault because they didn't build enough road capacity? Are we blaming the automakers because the jam was caused by a broken-down car?
What about the millions of hours of productive time that are wasted on social media? What about the student who fails a class because he wasted time on Facebook instead of studying? Or the employee who gets fired because he didn't complete a work assignment because Google Docs was down, and lost a chance at a produtive life. Are all online service providers now responsible for their users' life outcomes?
I don't think swartkrans was making any statement about the relative evil or harm of these companies, rather, he was simply commenting on their public perception. Yes, Blackwater/Xe/Academi does terrible things. Despite this, the general population has an even stronger negative perception of Comcast/AT&T/whatever, which should serve to further highlight the absurdity of the whole thing.
It can change its name all it wants, and then there's just a trail of obsolete names being attacked by people with outdated information. It would be more productive to name the people on the board of directors, who can't abandon their identities so easily.
The people sitting on the BoD of one giant company look just like the people sitting on another BoD. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if institutional investors or board members in Academi are the exact same people on the board of AT&T. They are all suits and they are all most interested in short-term profit.
It is the fallacy of both the left and the right to attribute human values to large corporations, both public and private.
This is actually a vary minor incident. It's easy to find US companies that kill 20+ civilians a month on average. Worse most of them are actively killing people for money. EX: Wait we actually need to legislation it or your going to actively advertise cigarette's to children? WTF is wrong with people.
O you set up a program to specifically drop sick people from your insurance plans. I guess sociopaths really do run things.
> Blackwater is a company whose employees kill people.
You have to eat to live. You have to pay to eat. Tricking people out of more money than they can afford, with no regard for how it might harm their lives, is negligence comparable in quality (though obviously not severity by degree) to firing a gun randomly in the dark.
There is a quantitative difference between running over one homeless person while speeding and running over a hundred people every day for a year. Yet both are illegal, for the same reason.
> If, after reading this, anyone is still nodding their head and entertaining the idea that their internet company is in the same league as Blackwater
Blackwater as a company (their employees' actions aside) isn't so different from an ATT or TWC. They seek convenient profits and have questionable ethics. Add to that wars on drugs and terrorism, along with unlimited ability to fund politicians. Certainly Blackwater is in a different league than ATT, but the leagues' owners are the same people.
The company, founded by secretive right-wing Christian supremacist Erik Prince, pictured above, had deep ties to the Bush Administration and served as a sort of neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Yeah, I think we can pretty much discard that link.
If the old Blackwater team were still together, I have high confidence that a multi-brigade-size unit of veteran American contractors or a multi-national force could be rapidly assembled and deployed to be that necessary ground combat team.
Not a lot of regret expressed there.
Praetorian Guard is a reasonably accurate description for his former organisation's activities; administration, special forces and covert intel ops directed from a higher level than the bread-and-butter army.
Not only not a lot of regret, but it really is a chilling comment for its implications. A single brigade-sized unit is something like 4,000 soldiers. So coming up with a multi-brigade-size unit could be twenty thousand veteran American contractors with, like you said, administration, special forces, covert intel ops, and all with recent combat experience.
The brazenness of Blackwater/Academi has always amazed me.
I actually am pretty happy with both my wired and wireless internet providers, although I know that makes me the odd man out. I have FiOS for the home connection, and they've been nothing but great. I have AT&T for wireless, and I'm fairly happy with them. It's not cheap, but for what I get it's not tremendously expensive either. I pay $130/month for two smartphones with 10GB of data and unlimited everything else, which isn't bad. They're actively discouraging the old contract system with subsidized phones, which was the source of a lot of trouble. I'll probably buy my next phone outright and they won't bat an eye.
I used to have Comcast and they were indeed awful. Terrible customer service, frequently clueless and unhelpful techs, and the service wasn't all that great either. Just trying to show that I'm not a complete corporate shill....
Anyway, I know that AT&T and Verizon aren't always liked either, but I think there's some substantial variation within the industry, even if maybe it's only between "awful" and "less bad".
$130/month for 10GB data is kind of a ripoff. Granted, it's only for one phone, but right now I pay 25 Euros (~$30) for unlimited calls and SMS and 5GB data per month (extendable for 10 Euros per 5 GB whenever I run out) in Germany. And that's expensive compared to other EU countries...
Agreed. I lived in Germany for about 9 months last year. I had cell service for about 15€/month. It really sucked to come back to the US and pay $100/month for worse service.
A lot of it is coverage. I could pay substantially less if I was willing to go with a worse network. How much would it cost you for a plan that covered all of Europe?
I pay $30 a month for 1000Gb of 4g. Unlimited texts, 60 mins calls (or I can swap unlimited calls for limited texts). I can internationally roam these 17 countries at no extra charge. (Up to 25Gb, 50k texts) :
Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Macau, Norway, Republic of Ireland, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, United States
I can also tether without rooting, my phone acts as a wifi hotspot.
Interesting. I wonder how they manage to pull that off. I see that they partner with T-Mobile and AT&T for the US. I don't imagine AT&T lets them access their network for so little money. I wonder what would happen if I got one of their SIM cards and then just used it full-time in the US. Would they cut me off as an abuser, or just eat the cost...?
There's always a catch! Still, that's quite a good deal if you live where they expect you to live. Good roaming while traveling abroad would be great to have. AT&T is definitely not good in that respect.
Calling the low tier employees scum is really unfair. They either do their job how management mandates it is done or they are fired. The lowly customer service rep isn't the reason Comcast is a piece of shit.
I dunno. Some employees are sympathetic: other times, people get defensive and toe the company line even when they know it's a bullshit policy.
There is nothing wrong with saying "I'm sorry, if I did this for you I would be fired."
Conversely, there is everything wrong with saying "No, I'm sorry sir, but I can't change that for you" when you know he can, he just won't. (in general; not referring to this case)
For reference, I worked in a Cable/ISP/telecom call center doing tech support, and had wildly varying feelings about different coworker's stances. So I'm not just armchairing opining.
"There is nothing wrong with saying "I'm sorry, if I did this for you I would be fired.""
Actually if you want to keep your job, everything is wrong with saying that. I worked at a Verizon Wireless call center for 3 years and there was no way that a statement like that would go ever well with any manager doing a call review.
"Conversely, there is everything wrong with saying "No, I'm sorry sir, but I can't change that for you" when you know he can, he just won't. (in general; not referring to this case"
Saying this is how you keep your job. There are call quotas that must be met. Calls are timed. Everything is monitored. Saying you can't change something for somebody does not mean that it isn't at all possible. It means, "I can't change this for you or else I would be in trouble with my managers." There is no point in wasting time explaining why something can't be changed when it's company policy it can't be changed.
Above all else, these reps are just the messengers. For many of those that I worked with, their stances came from a place of "would I rather get fired or feed my three children?"
There is nothing wrong with saying "I'm sorry, if I did this for you I would be fired."
Those employees are employed under At Will Termination. Their calls are often recorded for "Quality Assurance Purposes". I don't know that they wouldn't be fired after stating exactly that. They very probably won't have any recourse if they are fired. That's a pretty powerful incentive right there and I don't know that I'd blame them for toeing the company line and getting defensive.
It's easy to armchair quarterback when you don't have to work there.
>There is nothing wrong with saying "I'm sorry, if I did this for you I would be fired."
There is no external cost to you, but the customer service representative saying this may bear a personal cost for making this statement. Most customer calls are recorded for quality control. Believe it or not, these types of calls are actually listened to for both quality control and CSR script updates.
In general, a CSR will be unlikely to state that and really mean it unless they are willing to run the risk of being corrected or reprimanded by superiors.
Corporate communications teams would box anyone into a dead end or actively campaign for your termination if a story ever leaked where a service rep was recorded saying that.
You will have happier customers & employers if you stick to talking about what you can do rather than outlining the consequences of an action that you are unauthorized to perform. I'm not even sure what kind of real customer would give a rip if you were fired for doing something they want. Their objective does not include your sustained employment. It's writing the wrong that they've felt.
I recently changed my internet provider to a small ISP based in my state. Partially because they had good prices, but also on principle, I'm tired of giving my money to companies that are so incompetent/evil. I think more people need to start doing the same if they can. They ONLY way these companies will really change is if we stop giving them our money.
They try to actively create worse experiences for their customers.
No, of course they do't. They try to create revenue-maximizing opportunities for themselves at the expense of their customers - although many non-geek customers may even like these siloed, suboptimal applications for want of a better understanding of how they could be using their devices. Nobody deliberately sets out to make their product worse, that's a good way to lose customers to the competition. IT's an unwanted side-effect of trying to extract more revenue from each customer.
This doesn't preclude the companies from being greedy, negligent, compromising customers' security and so on. I agree that the effect of their policies is to create worse customer experiences. But to assume that their underlying motivation is make you unhappy is silly.
In gneral you'll be much happier if you stop worrying about why people do stuff like this and just learn to firmly insist on what you want, eg 'I purchased this unlocked phone because I do not like extra apps. Please sell me a SIM card and sign me up for a month-to-month service plan that I can opt out of any time. If you try to upsell me I'm going to leave and go to your competitor's store.'
I do appreciate how annoying and stressful you find this. I'm not American either and intensity of sales tactics in the US consumer space is culturally alien to me, but competitive contractualism seems to be regarded as the keystone of individual economic freedom in the US, vs the more paternalistic approaches that prevail in some other places.
It's true. Their convoluted billing schemes belong in the "mislead the customer for great profit!" hall of fame, right up there with insurance providers.
> For those of us who are Americans, isn't it amazing how the companies that provide us with access to the internet are pretty much among the most hated companies in our country?
My read is that when companies get large enough not to have to really compete, and especially when they have services that are hard to live without, then they go from seeing people as customers (whose loyalty they must win) to territory (which they conquer and exploit).
Capitalism works really well in the small when there's plenty of competition: I live in a neighborhood with a lot of local restaurants, and they're generally great. But dealing with an incumbent telco or cable company quickly makes me look like I have Tourette's.
I think minimal infrastructure should be free. We already have this with open source programs, public education, etc. but I think it should extend to the internet and other things.
What is "minimal" should be determined by some kind of system, and above that, there should be a free market. I believe the role of government is to ensure people's "minimal expectations" are met, and beyond that people can do whatever they want.
And hopefully I will be living by my own principles ... the platform that we've spent years building has been open sourced and put on Github. I think small businesses / apps can be built on top of it, but minimal infrastructure eventually becomes free.
I think you mean minimal infrastructure should be subsidized. There is no free in the physical world. The internet you are using comes in on big copper (or glass) cables and tearing up the ground costs lots of money. Overhead wireless internet is feasible, but not at the scale of an entire city, let alone a nation.
It's not like you can wave your hand and have a network magically appear. People have to dig up the streets, put the cables in the ground and connect things. There are servers in big datacenters and routers and all sorts of technical devices that have to be configured. It is not as simple as pushing a button and making your code open-source; building networks is construction not publishing.
If you think the internet should be subsidized (or nationalized) that's a conversation, but asking private companies to give things for free is ludicrous (you either mandate it to be free or accept the private status quo). If you really want free wifi, lobby for it.
Is the Internet a business or not? Is telecom a business or not? The highways are nationalized, and I'd argue that they work pretty darn well. It's very politically difficult to go from a privatized industry to a nationalized one, particularly in America (it has only historically happened during times of war or massive banking crises and even then quite rarely).
The fundamental question is this: Are these networks public or private? If they're public, most of these questions are non-issues. If they're private, again, most of these questions are non-issues. The reason we're talking about this stuff is because the line between public and private is hard to define.
Yes, I meant free in the sense that a certain basic level would be free OF CHARGE to everyone physically using it. Free basic level of food, water, education, medical care, internet, police, etc. There are good economic reasons for this.
Subsidized isn't exactly right because it sounds like the customer still has a copay. I mean wealth redistribution, but only to provide the basics for everyone.
One can probably achieve this by a basic income calculated in terms of the "minimal cost of living" in a certain area. If people want more than that, then they can start a company, pay taxes, go work etc. But those taxes would go towards ensuring the minimum.
In short I'm arguing for a very well-defined minarchist position that I can defend.
I believe the role of government is to ensure people's "minimal expectations" are met, and beyond that people can do whatever they want.
Conversely I believe that government should have no role other than acting as (as Bastiat put it) "the collective extension to our individual right to self defense". Let the government enforce property rights, provide rule of law and (maybe) enforce contracts. The world doesn't owe you an education, Internet access, a job, or anything else, and invoking use of force to try to ensure those outcomes is wrong IMO.
The world doesn't owe you property rights either. It takes force and coersion to enforce whatever guarantees and protections you feel you are entitled to under "your" system of property.
And if you claim it does, why can't I claim that the government should also, say, help ensure my right to life through emergency medical care in a hospital? After all it's a really barbaric society by 21st century standards that lets a man die if it means that no other man doesn't have to give up 2% of his fiat currency.
Taxes are the cost of doing business in a jurisdiction. It would be the same if you got rid of states and had some ther kind of organizations. In an ancap utopia, you'd iust pay rents instead of taxes. You'd still pay the mall, and the "city" or its equivalent and stillabide by the rules. If the city land was privately owned and administered by a top-down corporation that wouldnt get rid of force. Corporations would hire security firms and mercenaries just like they donow to "restrict your freedom" in their buildings.
In short there's nothing magical about states or property rights. If you had other organizatonal structures they'd still have to enFORCE their policies / laws and still have a management team / government. Corporations, co-ops, neighborhoods etc all have these things. They all have to be run somehow and enforce the policies.
And finally, once we gotoff the gold standard we got an elasti fiat currency that could ecpand with the increase in goods and services produced. That means less deflation and less hoarding (how often did you spend your bitcoins when they were going up in value?) And on top of this we have M2 money issued by banks, and then we have consumer credit etc. This means that good ideas such as by entrepreneurs like yourself can get funded. Then we also have limited liability and bankruptcy protections which helps startups form (less of that in Europe).
Finally the govt can just print fiat money to pay for this which doesnt "force" anyone.
Never said it did. I don't think the world owes anybody anything. The question is, when is using force / violence justified. My position is that initiation of force / aggression are not justified, but force can be used in self-defense.
It takes force and coersion to enforce whatever guarantees and protections you feel you are entitled to under "your" system of property.
Defensive force though. I'm against using force to compel people to participate in a system, or do things, against their will.
And if you claim it does, why can't I claim that the government should also, say, help ensure my right to life through emergency medical care in a hospital?
IF your structure (whether you call it "government" or something else) can accomplish that end without using initiation of force, there is no reason at all why they shouldn't do that. BUT, and here's the problem... in practice, "government" as we know it is pretty much always predicated on using violence to achieve its ends. Taxes are collected at the end of a gun barrel, and people aren't given an option to "opt out" in any realistic sense.
After all it's a really barbaric society by 21st century standards that lets a man die if it means that no other man doesn't have to give up 2% of his fiat currency.
Sure, no argument against that. But I'd argue it's an equally barbaric society - or more so - where we institutionalize the initiation of violence to achieve our ends, no matter how noble they sound.
In short there's nothing magical about states or property rights. If you had other organizatonal structures they'd still have to enFORCE their policies / laws and still have a management team / government. Corporations, co-ops, neighborhoods etc all have these things. They all have to be run somehow and enforce the policies.
The difference between a State and other structures is that States (in practice) aren't limited to voluntary association, and they claim for themselves the "right" to use force in a non defensive mode. Build a State that is strictly limited to acting as the collective extension to our individual right to self-defense, and I'd probably be onboard.
Finally the govt can just print fiat money to pay for this which doesnt "force" anyone.
Except, by and large, we've seen States refuse to allow anybody else to compete with their currency. If you try, they send men with guns to come and round you up and take you to jail. It will be interesting to see what happens with Bitcoin in this regard, since it is so decentralized.
I think you and I agree in a lot of the sentiments you expressed, but I am saying that there a lot of caveats to the assumptions behind thosd sentiments.
First of all if you got rid of states and cities and didnt have those centralized police forces there would still be "men with guns". They'd just be hired by some security firms that would work with various organizations but they'd still enforce whatever policies the organizations had.
Secondly in an ancap utopia you'd have rents instead of taxes which are also the cost of doing business - except instead of public jurisdictions you'd have private property. An immigrant to such a community would immediately find himself on someone's land and have to pay rent and abide by whatever possibly non-standard rules the landlord had.
Thirdly if money is the only signal, is the market is really "free" of any political mechanism then you could eg buy up justice, lakes whatever and then abuse its original intent. For example a millionaire could come in, buy off some judges and then proceed to rob people recouping their investment.
Fourth, taxes arent usually collected st the point of a gun. For example an employee's taxes are withheld by the employer with no guns involved. Taxes are the cost of doing business in a jurisdiction.
Fifth, states and cities do compete for resources, eg some towns in Arkansas will PAY YOU to move there and build house and give you $50k to start a business because they are losing people and they want to invest that way. They aren't immune from consequences and can't hike up their taxes to unlimited levels or pass absolutely any kind of local ordinances. Same with countries etc.
I think your main objection stems from the fact that land give rise to a natural monopoly. You can't have 100 roads going through one intersection and you don't want 100 militias operating on the same turf. If you look at the internet you'll also see large ecosystems - facebook google apple etc. which are in effect "states" in cyberspace. Their policies (eg google real names policy, facebook's privacy etc.) cause friction because they are so big and in some ways your membership with them is a contract of adhesion. But that's a situation that's similar to the states one.
You say violence is the main factor but I say that force is employed either way to enforce systems work. And usually that force doesnt lead to physical violence. But even if you ran things differently there would still be violence.
I completely agree with you that their service is awful and primarily geared towards sales. I also agree that they engage in price obfuscation in order to nickel and dime you to death: it's really obnoxious and makes for an awful customer experience.
I'll even agree with you that they are expensive (because they are). But they are expensive with good reason: a nationwide communications network is really expensive to run, and there's no fair way to allocate costs.
When considering throughput / capacity on infrastructure, peak usage is all that really matters. In that sense, someone who goes on Netflix and watches 2 hours of video every night at 8-10PM costs you roughly the same as someone with torrents running 24/7. Some ISPs have resorted to data caps because they at least introduce the possibility that you might go over, which causes people to at least think about their bandwidth usage.
When all is said and done, telecom companies in the US are profitable, but not insanely profitable. This is the entire reason that Comcast is the sole broadband provider in many of its markets: the payouts (margins) aren't big enough for another company to justify the upfront costs, except in a few profitable suburbs. If you look at cellular, where the big players DID overbuild in comparison to landlines, net margins STILL settled out close to 10-15% (not coincidentally, those are about the same as cable/landline.) And cellular is still awful, even though it is much more competitive than wireline.
Having worked at a number of big telecom companies, the vast majority of people who work at them have no exposure to any of the crap you're talking about. I know it's fun to generalize on the internet, but most people working at these companies are so far removed from anything regulatory or customer service related that it doesn't bother them. Hell, most of them are consultants who don't even work for the company.
Marketing is a hypothesis-driven steamroller: you test several variants of marketing material and see which one works best. The one that works best is probably the least honest one! So you go with it because your goal is to produce the most effective marketing material, not the most transparent. You probably don't even know enough about the product that's being sold to know you're being dishonest.
Actually the cable infrastructure was built almost exclusively with private money. Most of the grants and taxpayer money were to support universal access (i.e. paying the cable companies to wire up the less profitable areas of town). They wouldn't have even needed them in the current deregulated telecom environment.
Regardless, the build-out happened almost 40 years ago, and the infrastructure that exists today is a lot more complex and would cost a lot more to deploy today. Almost all of that complexity has to do with data transmission, which is a product that was never envisioned when the cable buildout was happening.
> While it's true that it's possible to run a company without being horrible, it's almost certainly far better for short-term profits to do so.
Only when you're in a monopoly or an oligopoly or similar. And this is a market failure in a capitalist economy. In this case, it's enforced by regulation, which is the opposite of what a capitalist economy is supposed to have.
I'm saying that the argument that we're observing capitalism at work is false.
> Is monopoly in general a failure? Or is it AT&T in this particular instance?
Monopoly is in general a market failure (which is why antitrust laws exist). Therefore AT&T having the position it does (not a monopoly, but an oligopoly at best) is a market failure.
> Is regulation the opposite of what capitalist economies should have?
My understanding is that capitalism (in the sense that the great-grandparent post was using it) is something that involves not having regulation. Since AT&T's position is a consequence of this regulation, the assertion that we're observing capitalism (in the sense I think the great-grandparent used the term) is false.
I dont know why you have been downvoted. You have a valid question. If monopoly or oligopoly is the situation all markets gravitate towards if left unchecked by regulation, then these situation are not failures but expected outcomes of capitalism. Why are these outcomes not considered effects of the invisible hand?
They are not. Their executives probably are because they're paid based on quarterly profits and won't still be around when it all catches on fire, but their actions are not in the long term interests of the shareholders.
Acting like a bag of idiots and making everyone hate you is bad for business. Your customers may not have any alternative today but tomorrow they're going to be lobbying for Google Fiber, municipal networks, community networks, more government regulation, antitrust enforcement, etc.
That assumes a sufficient fraction of the population understands its own self-interest and will hurt AT&T by supporting a disruptive competitor. I hope that's the case, but it's also possible that AT&T (or any company that seems to be mistreating consumers) has market research that indicates the vast majority of their customers are too passive to switch and can safely be milked like cows.
I'm not going to downvote you because I disagree, but agreeable people like you are why we as a society are where we are.
Excusing misconduct with excuses like "oh, they are just executives acting rationally in their shareholders best interests" is a moral hazard and despicable position.
Just the notion that we're casually comparing and excusing away mercenaries & war criminals and contrasting it to a telecom company is disgusting.
I didn't say anything about war criminals. That's a different thread. I said something about executives in boardrooms. I'm saying that these execs could give a damn about what they're selling, only that they sell lots of it.
This is a microcosm of society, perhaps, but my commentary was about capitalism.
Capitalism isn't the be all and end all of an open society. The fact that it's socially acceptable that an executive at a company like Blackwater can be compared to any other businessman is a problem. (In the specific case of Blackwater, they are well known enough to perhaps be an exception.)
Being a war profiteer, leader of old-style trust that exploits its customers or a peddler of political corruption isn't rationality -- it's an anti-pattern of capitalism.
You're right that it is an anti-pattern of capitalism. However it is possible for an anti-pattern to be completely rational, while having horrible consequences, given the way the system is set up. The consequences might be more clearly unacceptable when you see it with Blackwater, but exactly the same perverse incentives are driving every company.
Absolutely. If you don't like AT&T, don't buy their services. If you don't like Verizon, don't buy theirs. I have a smart phone on no contract and pay $10/month for service. I only get data via WI-FI but it's unlimited and that's good enough for me. There are alternatives. Everything is a tradeoff. AT&T either provides enough value that it's worth the cost or it doesn't. This is a decision that each customer makes.
Its not the consumers fault. The average consumer is going to act like the average consumer - and they are very unlikely to change any time soon. If capitalism causes problems when consumers act like consumers then that's a problem with capitalism.
The problem isn't even with AT&T, it is systemic. These companies exist in a system with perverse incentives that forces them to provide the lowest quality service possible, that consumers will still tolerate, in order to maximize profits. These aren't shitty business practices, they are completely rational for maximizing profits.
On that note, we cry out in rage when a for-profit does some money-grabbing evil, but we also get our feathers all ruffled when a company for social good wants to be for-profit.
If we don't want corporations to make money by being evil, shouldn't we want them to make money by being good?
Then doesn't that mean that we should try to change how they are behaving? They are abusing public infrastructure and their psuedomonopoly status to get those short term profits.
Small note: Blackwater changed its name to Xi, then Academi. And Academi is now part of Constellis Holdings. So if you hear about any of those in the news, it's the same group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi
>I feel like I'd rank them almost up there with Halliburton, Sodexo and Blackwater.
i.e. the typical left-wing "bogey man" companies. I'm surprised you didn't throw in News Corp as well.
I think Blackwater saved more lives than they lost, and if they were that bad why did the State Department keep re-employing them? You should read Erik Prince's biography. It might change your perspective.
> if they were that bad why did the State Department keep re-employing them?
Most people that think that Blackwater/Xe/whatever they are called today is bad also think that the government decision makers deciding to employ them are/were bad, at a minimum in the context of that decision, and quite frequently that the whole, long-term, multi-decade policy of progressively outsourcing formerly-military conflict-zone functions to civilian contractors is a bad trend driven in no small part by corrupt business-government relations in the military industrial complex.
So, saying "Well, the State Department hired them, so they must be good" is, well, kind of ignoring the entire basis of the opposition.
Here's the thing about these unlimited-throttling programs: They are good for both the consumer AND cellular operator, but you have to be upfront and honest about it.
AT&T's problem is that they just one day up and decided to start throttling unlimited customers (down to 10-20% of their normal speed) without a warning, and without it being made clear in any of their marketing material or contracts.
The reason why I call these programs "good" is that they all but eliminate overage charges from a consumer's bill. With limited data, you often get charged excessive amounts if you go over your cap (disproportionately large amounts at times).
So for example, if a consumer got their teenager 2 GB of data, and that teenager ran up a 5 GB usage bill one month, that could be an additional $60 charge ($20/GB) out of the blue. Unlimited-throttled data averts that possibility (and the teenager in this example is the only one negatively impacted by the excess usage).
This is how T-Mobile currently operates on all of their Simple Choice plans (both unlimited and limited). They have scrapped overage charges (so there is no bill-shock) and instead just throttle you down.
The only major difference between what T-Mobile currently do and what AT&T were doing, is that AT&T lied and hid it, and worse still charged customers ETF if they left as a result. T-mobile is completely upfront about the policy and how it is enforced.
PS - T-Mobile also do the same thing for roaming data, no overage charges.
> The reason why I call these programs "good" is that they all but eliminate overage charges from a consumer's bill. With limited data, you often get charged excessive amounts if you go over your cap (disproportionately large amounts at times).
That's a bad solution, because it solves the wrong problem. The real problem is overage charges.
Of all the other companies who provide me with metered service, not a single one uses the same pricing structure where I purchase an initial quota for one price, and then have to pay out the nose if I go over it. Everyone else just charges a flat unit price. It's a flat $x/gal for water, $x/kW/h for electricity, $x/m^3 for gas, $x/min for land line phone service, $x/min for Azure compute time, etc. etc.
That style of pricing is good. It's a straightforward, easy-to-understand "pay for what you use" model. Cell phone style pricing is worse because it's unpredictable and consumer-hostile because it makes you feel punished for using more of their service. Unlimited cell phone pricing is worse yet. It's supremely consumer-hostile because it forces light users to subsidize folks who watch Netflix while riding the city bus. As a light user (and informed consumer) I find that offer to be downright insulting; I hate it just as much as I'd hate if the gas station wanted to charge me the same flat monthly fee for me to buy gas for my economy car that I only use on weekend as they charge my neighbor to top off his Escalade that he uses for a 45-minute commute.
> Everyone else just charges a flat unit price. It's a flat $x/gal for water, $x/kW/h for electricity, $x/m^3 for gas, $x/min for land line phone service, $x/min for Azure compute time, etc. etc.
Except that consumers don't like those kinds of billing plans.
Consumers like fixed bill per month. Period. A plan that charges more per month than metered would still wins because the consumer sees it as a fixed charge.
It depends. I have no particular problem paying for electricity, oil, water, and Amazon S3 based on usage and it does provide me with the appropriate incentives to conserve. Obviously I'd have no problem paying a fixed rate for these services if doing so cost me less than I pay today but I have no particular preference for a fixed charge provided that my usage is relatively predictable and transparent.
I doubt that I'm atypical. As someone who tends to turn the lights off when I leave a room and keeps the thermostat relatively low in the winter, I don't have any particular desire to subsidize someone who leaves all their lights blazing and cranks the heat up to 75 degrees.
I find it somewhat interesting that people seem to be more accepting of usage-based pricing in some scenarios than others. I expect part of it is what we're used to--pricey per-minute domestic long distance phone pricing seemed quite normal until relatively recently. But I expect things like degree of predictability and control-ability factor in as well.
Thanks for the link. A lot depends on where a flat price ends up of course. There's benefit to predictability but not if I pay 2x what I would under a usage-based scheme.
That flat price is going to depend on things like marginal costs, to what degree flat pricing drives up average costs, and how much the heavy users drive up costs for others. As the link suggests, flat pricing seems to work pretty well for broadband but it's unclear how practical it is (today) for wireless.
> Thanks for the link. A lot depends on where a flat price ends up of course. There's benefit to predictability but not if I pay 2x what I would under a usage-based scheme.
Not necessarily. The combination of the value of the services you decided to forgo to not rack up metering charges and the mental cost of doing those calculations can be arbitrarily large, because the mental cost is a sunk cost[1] by the time you know whether paying for the additional metered bandwidth is worth it. You could theoretically spend all day worrying about using too much bandwidth without ultimately deciding to use any at all, so your bill would be much lower but at the cost of spending all day worrying about it.
There are also knock-on effects of not having unmetered service. It causes people to use less bandwidth (obviously) but that means they're deriving less value from the network, which means they're not willing to pay as much for service, which means slower upgrades, which means potentially higher customer costs in the long term as the price per GB stays higher longer.
> That flat price is going to depend on things like marginal costs, to what degree flat pricing drives up average costs, and how much the heavy users drive up costs for others. As the link suggests, flat pricing seems to work pretty well for broadband but it's unclear how practical it is (today) for wireless.
The strange thing about wireless is that it seems likely to eat itself. Spectrum is scarce and towers are expensive, but charging a high monthly fee for unlimited usage or a high metered rate is likely to drive customers to use WiFi rather than cellular whenever possible, which reduces demand for cellular and pushes the prices back down.
I suspect the equilibrium is going to be "unlimited" wireless service where only the first X amount of MB per month is "fast" and then the service works but is throttled. The result then is that everybody uses WiFi whenever they can to preserve their "fast" cellular bandwidth (or because they've already used it and then WiFi is much faster) but nobody actually has to worry about using too much because there is never any bill for the overage. And then you start demanding that WiFi access points be installed at whatever locations you were in where you used all your cellular bandwidth.
I pretty much agree. Quite a while back, Clay Shirky wrote about how one of the problems with micropayments (for online content) was the mental transaction costs that they entailed. There's a lot to that argument.
OTOH, as you suggest, there need to be proper incentives around scarce resources--such as using WiFi where available rather than cellular. The equilibrium you describe seems sensible--perhaps with throttling less extreme than AT&T's current version seems to be and with greater transparency.
My water bill changes seasonally by about $5 (I live in an apartment). My electric bill (heating, AC, water heater, etc.) goes from about 1x to 5x depending on season/weather. Cable is the same every month.
But everyone learned their lesson with the old limited minute/text plans. You pay $25 a month for service with occasional bills of $500.
It wasn't your fault. A bunch of people mistyped the phone number for a content and sent you texts by mistake and you got charged for them. You probably won't have to pay, but it will take three hours on the phone to sort that out. And you're busy. And they already took the money from your account so maybe something bounced.
Or maybe you just accidentally triggered the data on your old feature phone without a plan to the tune of $100/mb.
So no one trusts the phone companies. Everyone wants unlimited because the billing systems are so broken and byzantine at least you can predict what the bill will be. It's very hard for normal people to budget accidental $500 charges for making a trivial mistake.
I don't think it's fair to say that consumers overall like either one more than the other, it depends on what we're paying FOR.
Why are consumers okay with paying a metered fee for electricity, water, and gasoline?
There's competition and/or regulations pushing those prices into reasonable ranges. Usage is fairly predictable. These are things that are horrible to have suddenly shut off without warning (like what effectively happens when you're throttled into unusability). They are things that people need in order to be a functioning member of society in the majority of places on Earth (in places with good public transit, gasoline gets removed from this list).
Aside from point #1, those also sound like the Internet.
> Why are consumers okay with paying a metered fee for electricity, water, and gasoline?
They're not. But normally they don't have a choice.
However, some of the utilities in the Northeast have plans wherein your bill is mostly constant year round even in spite of the spikes at certain times of the year. Lots of people like them even though they almost always wind up paying more than they would otherwise.
It's not just about constancy, it's about having some relationship between how much you pay and how much you use. Utilities that offer that "pay the same every month" feature base the amount you pay on your average usage throughout the year.
Here's an analogy that's closer to cell phone unlimited plans: Imagine if it were instead the same flat fee for everyone across the country. I imagine you'd find the family that lives in a small apartment and keeps the house cool in the winter isn't too happy to find out that very little of their gas bill is explained by their own energy usage, and the vast majority of it is paying to heat the mansions of the rich people across town.
>> Why are consumers okay with paying a metered fee for electricity, water, and gasoline?
> They're not. But normally they don't have a choice.
Wait, what? Says who? I certainly don't speak for everyone, but I'm perfectly happy paying just for my usage of these things.
I think the difference is predictability and that the costs aren't astronomical if you have a high-usage month. If it's colder than usual, I'd perhaps expect to pay another 10% on my utility bill. That's reasonable and not a hardship.
If I were to spend, say, $30/mo on a plan with 500 minutes of voice calling, and went 100 minutes over, but was only charged, say, $6 for that overage, I'd have no problem with that (because 30/500=0.06 and 0.06100=6). But instead I get charged something like $20, which is way out of proportion to the overage. That's* the objection.
And I think part of it is related to an understanding of actually "using something up". When I use more electricity, I know that I actually used something up: that extra power came from more coal being burned, or more water falling from a dam, or something of that nature. When I use more water, I know that my use of it drained a reservoir a little bit more than it otherwise would. I used up a physical good, and I'm paying for that use. If I use more than what a regulator has decided is my "fair share", I might pay a premium for that extra (many utilities have tiered pricing), but I'm ok with that because I do recognize I'm using more than usual, and the added cost of the higher tier isn't unreasonable or burdensome.
But the cost of me spending 100 extra minutes on the phone costs the carrier basically nothing. Sure, if everyone did that in a month, perhaps it would strain the carrier's network (not that it would cause the carrier to spend capital on increased capacity; they'd likely be fine with more dropped/failed calls that month). In general, though, the marginal cost to the carrier when you use more minutes than your plan provides is near zero -- and yet the carrier charges an exorbitant markup for that overage.
> Why are consumers okay with paying a metered fee for electricity, water, and gasoline?
I don't think they are; certainly in my country people hate metered water. And people love fixed-rate mortgages even when they'd pay less on floating. If people had the option of unmetered electricity or gasoline, I think they'd take it.
It could be a regional thing, or it's possible that I am unusual myself, but I've never thought twice about metered electricity, but that's largely because I've never been hit with anything I consider unfair like I have with both mobile phones and home Internet.
Speak for yourself. Web access is a utility and it needs to be treated/regulated as such. Meter it at a flat rate. Telco pricing plans are confusing for a reason. It's a dark pattern so they can bleed you dry and make it hard to compare to their competition.
Part of you comment is good, but you may be missing a key effect: in the short term (and possibly the medium term), the marginal cost of data transmission is much less than its average cost. When the marginal cost is more than the average cost (as it is for gas, because of low-hanging fruit effects), then the simple Econ 101 solution is that the unit price will be the marginal price, and the supplier and buyer will split the surplus. However, when the marginal cost is lower there are all sorts of weird game theoretic and normative considerations that enter. It can be a Pareto and Utilitarian optimum for different users to be charged different marginal rates.
Data overage charges in Canada became such a headache with the flood of consumer complaints that the CRTC (rough Canadian equivalent of the US FCC) implemented regulations dictating a wireless code of conduct[1] for Canadian wireless operators to follow for their consumer segment. These regulations supposedly took effect on 2 December 2013[2].
One of the interesting ones is the following nugget: "to limit your data overage charges to $50 a month and your data roaming charges to $100 a month."[3]
I like T-Mobile's no BS approach. I had CLEAR for less than a month because of their throttling. Used it for a week or two and then loaned it to a friend while I was traveling for work. When I got it back, it was throttled so severely I could no longer log into gmail! It was slower than the EVDO modem it had replaced. Throttling is one thing, claiming 5G cap and then they'll throttle you but it'll be useable is another. It was unusable.
Clear is especially egregious, as their advertising is (or at least was, when I had it) explicitly geared towards using it as a replacement for a wired home broadband connection, and touting how it could be used for streaming video and all sorts of other bandwidth-intensive uses. But they throttled me into oblivion after a couple of weeks of using it like a home connection, then gave me the runaround for weeks because none of their techs had been informed of their throttling policies.
We just need truth in advertising. Do what you will, just tell me what it is, and I can figure out the rest. I personally like metered wireless plans because I know that my incentives align with those of the provider, and I'm comfortable with the overage charges. If unlimited-with-throttling is better for others, great! But don't try to sell me "unlimited, period" and then not deliver.
Agreed. If there is ever a shining example of why competition is important and mono/duopolies are bad, take a look at T-Mobile. Can you imagine if the DOJ let the AT-T/TMobile merger go through? And given that history, how they are even considering letting the Comcast/TimeWarner merger go through is amazing to me.
You have to use a TON of bandwidth for CLEAR to throttle you. The only time I've been throttled was when I streamed Netflix for about 8 hours straight. I've transferred GBs/day many times without throttling.
That said, they are not transparent about it. They refused to call it throttling or even agree that they were throttling me. They used misleading language like "fair-share for the antenna you're on."
I can not see how this is good for consumers, if compared to actual unlimited data.
At least T-Mobile Germany is throttling users to 64kbit/s after the cap is reached, which is so slow that you can't use most online services (logins over https just time out). Of course you can buy more uncapped gigabytes.
This is a perverse incentive scheme for the providers: they have no reason to upgrade the network capacity, because they can use the "network is overloaded" argument to limit the data volume, and to charge more from their users.
They can't if there's competition. We used to have caps on our cable connections here in Portugal; that works fine for the ISP until its competitor raises the cap, which they did, until we got unlimited connections.
What bothers me is that half of our regulatory system is basically a jumble of patches designed to fix the problems caused by lack of competition, which is often artificially introduced by the other half of the regulatory system.
Not to say this is the case, though. I think the FTC is completely right here - unlimited should mean nothing is curtailed based on your usage. Anything else is misleading, bordering on fraud.
E-Plus resellers are now offering a thing where you can buy 5GB for €15/month, but then buy another 5GB for €3 when you reach the cap. Repeat as needed. Not a bad deal for heavy users.
The worst part is that AT&T was VERY vague about the threshold. They just called it "in the top tier of users". The policy would push the average down over time, which means that "the top tier" threshold would become lower and lower.
Yes, the real issue in the complaint is likely the grandfathered consumers who signed up to AT&T understanding one definition of unlimited just to be forced into another. I don't think it's an FTC attack on "unlimited but throttled" data plans.
I imagine they were quite happy when you cancelled your plan. I don't think they want to provide it, but either are somehow obligated to continue providing it for those who have it already due to something in the contract, or think it would be bad PR to just outright cancel it. I'd wager that the throttling is less about network health and more about convincing people to switch away from a plan AT&T doesn't want to have anymore.
> This is how T-Mobile currently operates on all of their Simple Choice plans (both unlimited and limited). They have scrapped overage charges (so there is no bill-shock) and instead just throttle you down.
T-Mobile does this? I use my phone a LOT with them and haven't noticed any throttling.
They don't do this on unlimited, as far as I can tell. However, if you're not on an "unlimited high-speed" plan, they will throttle to almost unusable speeds.
It might be that you don't use as much data as you think. I use my phone for data stuff all day long, but don't stream music or video, and it's the rare month I go over a gigabyte. Apparently perusing stock prices and weather reports doesn't use all that much. However, on a recent motorcycle trip in Canada it hit some limit and got throttled. Non-https would work if I was really patient. Apple Maps worked okay, if slowly. Google Maps: don't even bother.
EDIT: I got it wrong. I got throttled because a 3rd-party contractor dug up Frontier's FioS lines, so I used my phone as the house hotspot on a 5Gb plan. Then we tried to watch something on the Apple TV. In HD. Oopsie. Upgraded to unlimited high-speed data after that. The Canada thing was T-Mo's "unlimited data in select countries". Problem there is that high-speed is quite tiny (200Mb?), then it's throttled. They'll sell you an international roaming pass for a reasonable price, though.
Wind Mobile (in Canada) has an "Unlimited US Roaming" package that includes "Unlimited data". In reality its T-mobile, they give you 1GB and throttle you down to a useless speed (>1 Minute per page load when browsing)
Maybe it's where you are located. In WI, after my LTE/3G throttling ran out, my EDGE was basically not internet. My phone was only useful as a cell phone at that point.
The issue I have with this type of service is that although we understand the need to remove network congestion caused by a very minute group of heavy users, it doesn't really solve the problem...
(1) They're still heavy users for that portion of the month when they have 2GB or 10GB or whatever of full access data
(2) When they're using non-peak hours or less populated towers they're still throttled even though there is no service impact
A better service would be an aggressive QoS that prioritizes users who haven't used their fair share of the network and allows those heavy hitters to wreck havok when they're up streaming 1080p videos at 4AM.
yes, for new customers, unlimited-throttling is better than flat+overages, but it is not as good as unlimited (which is no longer offered). the problem, as you pointed out, is that at&t baited & switched.
and to be sure, throttling is a limit. for those on unlimited plans and according to the way it was advertised, you should be able to get up to the physical limit of the network every month. if that's 500GB/month, the you should be able to use 500GB/month every month according to the agreement. allowing you to use 5GB at the normal rate and 5GB more (or whatever it is) at a drastically reduced rate is not unlimited. the fact that they didn't consider bandwidth requirements when they made the offer is not the concern of the customer who accepted that offer.
If your company makes a claim of X but doesn't deliver, perhaps instead does Y, it is an FTC issue. This is a lesson everyone who runs a company should be thinking about.
"Unlimited" or otherwise, throttling has been done for a long time by other carriers as well. I would like a refund.
Agreed. I'm on a low-data-plus-throttling plan on AT&T's prepaid subsidiary Cricket. I was on their lowest-tier 200MB plan for $15, and if I went over by even 1KB, I was "conveniently" given another 200MB for $15, effectively doubling my data bill. Now, if I go over my limit, I can still get texts and emails while I'm out-and-about, but I can't visit tumblr. I much prefer that, especially if I hit my limit the day before my billing cycle restarts.
> began throttling data speeds in 2011 for its unlimited data plan customers after they used as little as 2 gigabytes of data in a billing period
This is what really gets me. I expected this sort of situation to come about when some jackass used up 1 petabyte of bandwidth on his unlimited plan, but 2 gigabytes?
To me, that's like offering unlimited coffee refills, but stopping customers after the second cup, with some excuse that there has to be some limits to "unlimited".
Wouldn't it be more like after 2 cups they only get served in half-cup increments? I agree with the sentiment. Unlimited with throttles isn't truly "unlimited", but "unlimited*". That said, the FTC complaint seems to take issue with that AT&T did not "adequately disclose to its customers" this information. And there, I take some issue with this. AT&T did actually explain that. Maybe some consumers didn't understand that because of the lack of an asterisk. I guess this will be interesting to see just how important an asterisk can be.
Maybe the FTC should just crack down on all footnoted disclaimers.
"Access some websites with your AT&T phone while in AT&T service areas." doesn't have the same punch as "Unlimited Internet Everywhere", but at least it is more or less true.
Yeah, you're right that the grandfathered consumers are a special case. It would be like having truly unlimited coffee refills then all of a sudden being told you're getting half-cup intervals.
Aren't they the only case here? AT&T hasn't offered unlimited data plans for quite a while. They basically only had them for the original iPhone introduction, and got rid of them seemingly as soon as they could.
What if I'm the only person who uses data on that cell tower and there is no contention on the line at all?
Throttling when someone is causing problems for other people can be fair, but that's not what's going on. They chose an arbitrary point and applied a capricious punishment.
At the same time they were pushing people to new plans that gave them less for a much higher cost, but AT&Ts costs to provide the service have been dropping.
I've been on the AT&T unlimited plan for a long while now, and I've been looking forward to the day when I get a $10 settlement check in the mail whilst some law firm pulls in $200mm in legal fees.
Another shitty() reality is that companies love putting clauses in contracts that won't hold up in court because MANY people just assume that it must be legal and the rest of the contract is still binding, just not the illegal parts.
() This is really done to protect mom and pop business. If they accidentally put in a clause that's not legal, it'd really suck if the entire contract were nullified. But big companies with bajillion dollar lawyers use this loophole to essentially intimidate their customers.
as long as someone else besides ATT enjoys that money and the situation gets resolved (but they need to also go after the other "unlimited" plans at other companies)
AT&T silently killed what formerly was an unlimited plan out of the blue one day, and not many people noticed. I would constantly run into the 3 GB limit a week or two into the month and then suffer through the slow throttled 0.5 Mbps rates for the rest of the billing cycle in agony.
At that point I realized I was essentially paying for a 3 GB data plan (remember, no tethering provisioning was included or even could be added) under the auspices of an 'unlimited' tier. I switched to mobile shared but that turned out to be a huge mistake for other reasons (among which was that corporate discount codes didn't apply to the $30 phone fee on top of the bucket charge), and then shortly after that left for T-Mobile where I now have a real unlimited plan for less money. Not the full speed tiers + throttled data after that plan mind you, the actual unlimited plan.
What's really disappointing is that it took the FTC until now to build a case or whatever legal burden is required to go after AT&T for their elaborate bait-and-switch. This is years after the fact, and I wonder how much extra money AT&T made as a result.
What did you think was a mistake about the mobile shared plan? I just switched to that for my single device and I was enjoying the money saved. Am I missing a "gotcha"?
* I previously had a 23% discount (FAN code) on my account which applied to the unlimited data lines in a favorable way. In essence, it applied to both the $30/month data fee for Unlimited, and the couple hundred minutes of call and unlimited text family plan which were sort of an umbrella for all the lines. With mobile shared, one of the gotchas I didn't discover until well after the first bill (since the perpetual excuse with a FAN code discount is – it takes a while to apply) was that the discount applies only to the mobile shared data bucket charge, not to the $30/phone, $x/tablet, $x/modem device access charge line items which quickly add up if you have more than a single line. This really threw off the math I had done for affordability and made it more expensive for me.
* The tiers previously were structured a bit differently, and with the two lines I had plus another person, I would always hit the 10 GB I had signed up for, then pay the $15/GB overage. Going to the next tier up to avoid paying overage for a GB or two would've still been more expensive, so like clockwork I would always end up paying some overages. Since then they've doubled some of the larger tiers as a reactionary measure.
Affordability wise quite honestly AT&T is close to parity with T-Mobile if you manage to get the mobile shared value plans which have cheaper monthly rates if you bring your own device or buy without a contract.
Some people don't realize that the real cheap rates are because you are giving up a subsidy, and that your next new phone will raise the rates again. OTOH I personally think that's a benefit since I can choose to get the subsidy or Next or just buy the phone outright.
I've been on a (now grandfathered) 'unlimited' data plan with AT&T since 2008 (iPhone 3G > 4S > 5S). Can confirm the throttling, lately after 3GB of data usage in a billing period
A friend of mine was staying with AT&T because they had the grandfathered in 'unlimited' plan but when they figured out it really was a 2GB plan and a throttle that let them change carriers without feeling like they were "losing" something.
This is exactly where I'm at now. Been evaluating leaving our unlimited data plan because it seems it's effectively a 3gig plan that doesn't allow tethering. For the same cost I think I can get 6G shared with my wife and tether if I need to.
I had unlimited up until my 5S when we went to a family data plan because it made financial sense. I can't help but feel they were throttling my internet PRIOR to the 3GB mark as well but this may be due to more phones coming online that lowered speeds across the board. I am VERY pissed with AT&T right now as my house (which used to get 3-4 bars no problem) now only gets 1 bar and regularly cuts in and out. Also mobile data is crapshoot even if I am in an area that you would expect good speeds from. I've gone full circle from all local -> all cloud -> all local because I can't trust my connection to work. Finding out that AT&T was injecting a tracking ID into my web requests is just the icing on the cake today..... I hate AT&T.
Ditto (since 2007). I used to be able to stream Spotify at maximum quality. I got a 2g utilization/throttle notice. Now it skips and staggers and I've had to downshift in order to have uninterrupted playback.
For people in the U.S./Canada looking for a provider who gives a shit and who live in an area with decent Sprint coverage, check out Ting. I've been using them for about 2 years now and they've been rock solid (I am in no way affiliated with them, I'm just that happy with them).
The closest reasonable thing to sending photocopies of your middle finger in their (Verizon/AT&T) "business reply" spam postal mailings is giving someone else who kicks ass your business (don't do the photocopy thing, the people who have to open and transcribe those things don't like Verizon/AT&T either).
So, I wonder if this is the first salvo in a war on all the major carriers who use the same "unlimited but throttled" marketing scheme? If AT&T loses this one, will the FTC go after T-Mobile and Sprint, who also do this? (Verizon doesn't offer unlimited data to new customers, but had kept it going for grandfathered customers, and backed off from plans to throttle them[1]).
The issue doesn't seem to be the "unlimited by throttled" business model, but the adequate disclosure of that information to the consumer. Other carriers may have worded it differently. More importantly though, AT&T had a grandfathered contract with consumers for unlimited without throttling (or "true unlimited"). Those changes along with their vagueness make AT&T a special case. In any case though, I'm sure the other carriers will watch this case closely.
I am not a lawyer, but from reading the link, it sounds like the problem isn't that they throttled the data, but that they hid/lied about it.
Neither T-Mobile or Sprint hide the fact that they throttle / rate limit their subscribers for various reasons. So presumably, they are less at risk here.
As a former Sprint customer, I'll disagree about that particular carrier. Sprint has offered "unlimited" data for a long time, but after they finally got the iPhone a few years ago, they saw a surge in data usage and started implementing undisclosed and seemingly random soft caps on all their unlimited data customers, all while claiming they offered "truly unlimited data" that wasn't throttled. They have only very recently admitted[1] to throttling some of their customers, but it's actually been going on for a long time according to customer complaints in their support site.
As for T-Mobile, it's my understanding that they changed their policy to include the possibility of throttling and initially didn't disclose it until it was leaked[2].
Of course, neither of these situations are as customer-hostile as AT&T has been, so maybe the FTC won't go after them. But I wouldn't be surprised if Sprint and T-Mobile make changes to their policies if AT&T loses.
There is debate on the thread about whether or not low level AT&T employees are scum...
I don't claim to know, but a funny thing happened a few weeks ago. My girlfriends android phone was acting up and shutting off randomly. So she took it to the AT&T store to have it reinstalled (I don't know much about smartphones and didn't want to play with it). So, in the middle of the day, I get an angry call from her accusing me of installing Linux on her smartphone (and why not? I install Linux on everything else...It must have been me!). The guy at the AT&T store told her since I had installed Linux there was nothing he could do for the phone and couldn't reinstall it nor repair it. I protested my innocence but she said the guy in the store had given her proof and she would show me that night. (I was actually a little curious as this was the first I had heard of Linux proper running on a stock android phone). So when the moment of proof came, she pulled up an android screen with the kernel version and there it was... at the bottom of the screen in bold white letters... "SELinux status". Proof! I mean, it said Linux!
So maybe they aren't evil, but that guy at least left me wondering about their general competency. I laughed for half an hour solid imagining all the Linux infected phones he must be seeing coming in.... Or more likely, he was just trying to sell her a new phone.
I hope this is the beginning of the end of Fair Usage Policies (FUP) masked as "unlimited Internet". The best part of the release was the note
> The Commission files a complaint when it has “reason to believe” that the law has been or is being violated and it appears to the Commission that a proceeding is in the public interest. The case will be decided by the court.
I had the unlimited plan for several years and was shocked and outraged to find that they were throttling after I reached a certain limit.
So I switched to Sprint's unlimited plan and now I can rest at ease that I have a consistent experience. My bandwidth is now throttled 100% of the time by the crappiness of their network.
While this appears good, this is nothing more then a show. AT&T will end up paying virtually nothing[1]. If you get angry when companies like Microsoft can go and seize domains, property and anything else in civil matters - this lovely agency has helped pave most of the way for them. The bulk of their cases come with Ex Parte Temporary Restraining Order's and Asset Freezes[1].
What will likely be the most egregious offender with the highest amount of "consumer damage" (AT&T) they don't even use the word "scam" or "fraud" in the complaint or press release. AT&T has already won. I doubt anyone there is losing any sleep over this.
I don't see how anybody wins from this complaint. AT&T already no longer offers any unlimited plans to new customers, and the most likely outcome will be to no longer offer renewals of the existing grandfathered plans.
It's not as if anyone on those plans using 5GB+ a month isn't already aware of the throttling: AT&T is pretty good about notifying you when you are close to or over the limit.
I guess a settlement might let some folks in the middle of their contact get out easier.
But personally, even considered as just a 5GB/line plan, my grandfathered plan is cheaper than anything currently offered (almost even before you account for the $450/line device subsidy!). Probably won't be the case in two years when I'm up again, but for now I'm glad the FTC didn't file this complaint a few months ago.
> AT&T is pretty good about notifying you when you are close to or over the limit.
I am currently and have been for years on an unlimited data plan with AT&T, easily use over 5GB a month, and have never been notified of any limit ever.
My wife is on a standard plan and gets notified when she goes over. AT&T does not notify unlimited users.
I made the mistake of downloading over 20GB of music and files on my new iPhone 6. The phone has been almost useless since hitting that limit. So much for "Unlimited Data".
But, I am waiting for a check for over $1300 as part of a class action settlement with AT&T after being overfilled for service.
I love seeing AT&T getting this kind of attention from the FTC for their terrible, terrible, monopolistic and greedy tactics. Their goal is to squeeze every penny they possibly can out of their customers. Their service has always been subpar.
I really hope that this lawsuit costs AT&T a lot of money; It needs to hurt in order to teach them a lesson.
One can only hope that we can someday have a competitive wireless market with 5+ options for consumers to choose from. That is when customer service will become real.
I wonder if anyone would like clearly-advertised "unlimited data, harmonic throttling":
First X amount of data at full speed
Second X amount of data at 1/2 of full speed
Third X amount of data at 1/3 of full speed
Fourth X amount of data at 1/4 of full speed
etc...
(With perhaps prices based on what that X is, or the decrease in speed could be more gradual.)
This is clearly "unlimited" since you can transfer as much data as you want, it just takes a little longer for each additional amount (until the next billing period). :-)
Let's say you get your nth X GB at XGB/(1000n)s. Then in a month=2628000seconds, you'd get at most about (70X)-ish GB per month. Meanwhile, if you get a flat X GB at XGB/(1000)s, then you get up to (2628X) GB per month. That sure doesn't feel unlimited in comparison.... but I suppose when I put it that way, all data plans are limited by finite time. :-)
I'm on the $60-70/month T-Mobile plan that gives me truly unlimited 4G data; no throttling.
I might not use more than 2G a month most of the time, but if I need to use more, I don't have to worry (such as when I had to go out of state when a family member had emergency surgery a couple of months ago).
I wouldn't switch back to AT&T as a wireless carrier even if someone paid me every month.
Can't wait to send in the threatening email that i received from AT&T stating explicitly that my "unlimited" bandwidth will be throttled because i happened to be in a high usage area. Seriously there should be a place where everyone who received such emails can post them en masse...
I left AT&T because of this. My iPhone went dead data wise after 3GB of usage, on unlimited data plan. We went to arbitration and they let me out of my contract, and unlocked my phone. They clearly know they are ripping people off trying to force them to nickel and dime the tiered plans.
Do people actually think that wireless carriers have the bandwidth to handle everyone streaming HD at once? They throttle so there's headroom for spikes in overly-saturated network segments. It's not like they just don't like it when you use their service.
That's a great theory, but what are the actual limits? Why not introduce throttling to everyone at once only at times of actual spikes instead of forcing me to sit through a week of having an essentially useless phone until the billing cycle goes through?
More importantly, why the hell are millions of people paying for something that they were promised but aren't getting?
I have an unlimited data plan as well and I am 100 percent positive that AT&T throttles at 5 gigabytes and when they do its really bad, like .6 megabits per second down :(
AT&T can't be the only operator guilty of such throttling. A previous article was published about Verizon also considering implementing throttling data consumption.
arent these cell companies really misleading every customer by charging them for Minutes, SMS, AND Data, when really all that needs to be given to the customer is an ip address that one can call/text/email etc.? i've never understood why our phone numbers arent ip's they seem to be a converging set of numbers at this rate anyways.
Here is what the FTC says would have been valid options:
"Defendant has numerous alternative ways to reduce data usage on its network that do not involve violating its promise to customers. One alternative would involve Defendant requiring existing unlimited data customers to switch to a tiered data plan at renewal. ... Another alternative would involve Defendant introducing its throttling program at renewal, with disclosures at point
of sale. ... Yet
other alternatives might include limited, narrowly tailored throttling programs that are consistent
with Defendant’s contracts, advertising, and other public disclosures. "
So essentially, you'd end up in the same place, but you would have to be informed about it. And might be able to leave without ETF.
Which is really the way it should work. Let AT&T have all the crappy customer-hostile policies they want as long as they fully disclose it in a sufficient manner to their customers.
Then, their customers can vote with their money and go to a competitor that offers more for their money. That's the way it SHOULD work, but probably won't :(
This 'unlimited' term is very misleading.
Every connection that has a bandwidth cap will be tied and limited by that cap. ie. 10mb/s is limited to 10mb/s period.
There is no such thing as 'unlimited' unless of course the connection has no virtual cap, then that would be considered unlimited.
So every connection plan as we know is limited and never unlimited.
I dream one day we will all have 1 Gig per second up and down on our mobile phones and it will cost less than a gallon of milk. A man can dream can't he lol .
First of all they are incredibly expensive. They try to actively create worse experiences for their customers. Forced inclusions of apps on android phones on mobile carriers. A comcast rep wanted to install a browser toolbar on my computer. Vague billing that leads to sticker shock. $0.25 per tiny little text message, really? I paid next to nothing to post this comment on HN, but had I posted such large amounts of text via a text message, it would have cost a lot of money.
Talk to them on the phone and they try to sell you things you don't need. Like one time I wanted to get HBO, HBO costs $15 a month, period, but when you talk to them on the phone they wont tell you that unless you ask a specific question, they'll tell you about their bundles which will cost you hundreds of dollars extra. This is a really scummy thing to do. They know the person who contacted them only wants HBO, but then they sell them something way worse they didn't want.
Collusion with illegal federal programs that involved lying to congress, lying to our public representatives. These companies are filled with scum from top to bottom. The people that you deal with in the stores, the people that decide which phones you can buy at their store and what they have on them, the people you talk to on the phone, the executives. It must be like working for a tobacco company, once you're willing to work at such a place the culture just destroys your integrity or something. I have no idea. I even still considerably distrust tmobile, even though they seem to be trying to change things.