Slashdot Mirror
The Cultures of Texting In Europe and America
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The cultures of text messaging are very different in Europe and North America, according to an internet sociologist named Danah Boyd. Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages, but 'all-you-can-eat' data plans are beginning to change that. All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. When a European youth runs out of texts and can't afford to top up, they simply don't text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren't actually kept out of the loop. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. "
I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive. I read somewhere that it had to do with technical limitations around billing systems and that it just became like that by tradition (or because US law made it impossible to reverse it)
Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???