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AT&T Changes TOS, Limits Streaming, Tethering
MojoKid writes "Just one day after announcing plans to subsidize netbooks, AT&T wised up to the fact that those netbooks and connections could be used to download movies and enjoy other bandwidth-intensive applications. Apparently trying to avoid bogging down their network, the company revised its data plan service terms to single out and prohibit 'downloading movies using P2P file-sharing services, customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device, and web broadcasting...' The license agreement further prohibits tethering the device to PCs or other equipment. That's a pretty strict set of rules. After all, the new terms of service seems to limit applications such as SlingPlayer, Qik, Skype, and Jaikuspot, which many AT&T customers are currently using without issue."
Update — April 4, 02:50 GMT by SS: Reader evn points out an Engadget report that AT&T quickly retracted the changes.
Engadget is saying the terms have already been retracted
In AT&T's world, you can have unlimited access to the Internet, provided all you want to do is look at static web pages and check your email.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Don't use AT&T as your provider.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/03/att.retracts.cell.tos/
Here's a cookie... *psst* it's MAGIC
Is this the same slower-than-hell network the iPhone connects to? 'cause I got news for them, it's already bogged down. Perhaps they should worry less about the 3 guys who can be bothered to figure out how to tether their netbook and add some more pipes instead...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
First, yes, I know people have posted that ATT has already retracted this particular TOS.
But, I have a more general question. When I sign a contract with any mobile company for service, shouldn't the TOS be fixed at that point? If ATT (or whoever the mobile co is) wants to require me to accept new TOS in the future, does that entitle me to get out of the contract without an early-termination fee?
Seems to me that a contract where one party can change the terms at any time and I must accept those terms without being able to terminate the contract, is a pretty darn aweful contract. So aweful, I would think it would be illegal?
Yes, it's quite ridiculous. Their terms of service are like not letting a fat person into a buffet, because they will eat more. Quite frankly I think terms like that are preposterous. I hope their TOS will get challenged at some point.
..or the management of the company that's rewarded by the shareholders when you discuss your silly little proposition to actually add value to AT&T's services.
Adding pipes requires investing money. Invested money is money that can't be returned to the shareholders and more particularly can't be used to support positive evaluations of short-term management performance. So why, exactly, would anyone in charge of making decisions at AT&T feel any need whatsoever to invest in more bandwidth?
And that's just if we're thinking about normal business types here -- remember, telecom execs are an entirely different breed, largely unschooled in things entreprenurial, innovative, or competitive, but rather making money via rentierism from monopolies (de facto or official). We'd be lucky if someday there's a "damn the torpedoes we're going with 5 blades and an aloe strip" kind of response.
I think if we're ever going to have ubiquitous and affordable wireless data service, it's going to have to come from an enterprise whose roots are more silicon valley and less telecom. We'll see.
Tweet, tweet.
And... After all these years, I would have thought that Slashdot editors would have learned to be editors.
Quote from the Slashdot story: " After all, the new terms of service seems to limit applications such as SlingPlayer, Qik, Skype, and Jaikuspot, which many AT&T customers are currently using without issue."
It's JoikuSpot, very interesting software that makes your 3G cell phone into a wireless provider. JaikuSpot seems to be some kind of Twitter.
I thought AT&T was duly & successfully sued (in past) for attempting to limit competitive uses of the Internet.
Who will sue them now for this outrage? (Skype, maybe?)
Internet access is becoming a tremendous issue for (American) cellular providers (I can't speak for the rest of the world's markets). The technology is there to allow them to effectively be wireless ISPs with extremely wide coverage, but the infrastructure most likely isn't up to snuff for that, and there's potentially more money to be made by nickel-and-diming for everything through a closed and restrictive service rather than act as a dumb pipe to the internet. There's some pretty strong demand though for just that, though, a widespread wireless dumb pipe to the internet.
I suspect that there's gonna be some pretty interesting changes to the industry over the next few years. Will we perhaps transition away from cellular phone service providers to something else?
How did we get to the point where telling absurdly transparent lies in public is normal and accepted? Is anybody seriously expected to believe that AT&T changed the TOS for one of their fairly major services by accident?
"Well, yeah, the work experience kid really, really hates streaming video, and he slipped in some changes, and somehow they snuck past the entire legal department, and down to our web guys, and on to our website, y'know how it goes..."
At most, a typo slipping through might be a mistake. A fully formed list of forbidden activities, with attached legal verbiage, isn't exactly a keyboarding error. Short of nerve agents, I'm not sure how even a PR flack could keep a straight face through this one.
As soon as Bell Labs perfects a time machine, AT&T will begin offering unlimited, unfiltered cellular internet, connected directly to the internet of 1994.
My god, it <blink>s!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's odd that they would have even considered this. Their cap is 5GB/month. I would think that that would be enough to stop most of this activity.
This is not a really good thing happening, I mean now I have to fix my Downloads so my conenction wont be
I tell you what the error was -- the text was added on March 30 and March 30 is not the correct date for the text to be added to the Terms and Conditions. It will be added on the correct date and at that time it will not be added in error.
They may have said it has since been retracted but it looks still pretty much up there to me. http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/plan-terms.jsp
And they must have been pretty determined to spell it out, with all the legalese you see here, so I doubt it was an accident.
Here's the text as it is still live on their site:
Prohibited and Permissible Uses: Except as may otherwise be specifically permitted or prohibited for select data plans, data sessions may be conducted only for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). While most common uses for Intranet browsing, email and intranet access are permitted by your data plan, there are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and interference with the network and are therefore prohibited. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing; (ii) as a substitute or backup for private lines, landlines or full-time or dedicated data connections; (iii) "auto-responders," "cancel-bots," or similar automated or manual routines which generate excessive amounts of net traffic, or which disrupt net user groups or email use by others; (iv) "spam" or unsolicited commercial or bulk email (or activities that have the effect of facilitating unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email); (v) any activity that adversely affects the ability of other people or systems to use either AT&T's wireless services or other parties' Internet-based resources, including "denial of service" (DoS) attacks against another network host or individual user; (vi) accessing, or attempting to access without authority, the accounts of others, or to penetrate, or attempt to penetrate, security measures of AT&T's wireless network or another entity's network or systems; (vii) software or other devices that maintain continuous active Internet connections when a computer's connection would otherwise be idle or any "keep alive" functions, unless they adhere to AT&T's data retry requirements, which may be changed from time to time. This means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition devices is prohibited. Furthermore, plans(unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to computer accessories, Bluetooth® or any other wireless technology) to Personal Computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose. Accordingly, AT&T reserves the right to (i) deny, disconnect, modify and/or terminate Service, without notice, to anyone it believes is using the Service in any manner prohibited or whose usage adversely impacts its wireless network or service levels or hinders access to its wireless network, including without limitation, after a significant period of inactivity or after sessions of excessive usage and (ii) otherwise protect its wireless network from harm, compromised capacity or degradation in performance, which may impact legitimate data flows. You may not send solicitations to AT&T's wireless subscribers without their consent. You may not use the Services other than as intended by AT&T and applicable law. Plans are for individual, non-commercial use only and are not for resale. AT&T may, but is not required to, monitor your compliance, or the compliance of other subscribers, with AT&T's terms, conditions, or policies.
Mod parent up.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I think companies should be required to provide these changes of ToS to users in writing, whether it be electronically or physically, and require the user to approve on such changes, before such change becomes the de facto ToS.
It's pretty simple. Dictating what customers can do with their Internet-connected computers when you are a pipe provider is a no-no. Don't go there.
You shouldn't even by listening in anyway, perverts.
If you need to charge differential monthly rates for different amounts of bandwidth used or available to differnet subscribers, then by all means create a tiered rate structure, and compete with competitors (like new wi-max services) on it.
The Internet is an open and free and flexible worldwide connection of information processing and display devices to each other, and it needs to remain unbiased with respect to, and ideally, unknowledgeable about, the semantics of the content it carries, except in that one could imagine data saying "I want to be real-time, please help me" in an extremely general sense.
If you can't offer such an Internet, stay out of the business of pretending to offer it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm the first to argue that transfer caps on fixed broadband are bullshit: nothing but thinly-veiled attempts by cable companies to strangle video downloads in the hope of protecting their broadcast revenues.
Might mobile broadband be a different story though? There's only so much data you can push through the air on a given frequency range with a given SNR... might it be that the cellular network can't support a significant number of video-downloading mobile users? It was, after all, designed to support voice calls at somewhere around 9.6kbit/s, with data capabilities grafted on as a bit of an afterthought.
We'd all like a future in which cellular companies are generic wireless bit pipes, carrying voice, video, and everything else the internet has to offer at the best possible quality... but what kind of cellular network would it take to make that a reality? With the spectrum we have available, would we need a low-power cell on every street corner?
AT&T may have simply jumped the gun, and might still intend to promulgate these TOS in the future.
Remember how on more than one occasion the free AT&T wireless for iPhone at Starbucks / other hotspots was announced, then retracted as a mistake?
Considering how quickly the retraction was made, isn't it more likely that they're simply waiting for their lawyers to excise the right pieces without screwing up the rest of the ToS?
This isn't just a quick sweep of the mouse followed by Backspace, here.
A lot of buffets now have time limits, i.e. "All you can eat - 90 minute seating limit".
They also can and will ask you to leave for eating too much. One of my good friends has been asked to leave several times. Ironically, he's in incredibly good shape and probably weighs around 140-150 - he just has an insane metabolism.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
more likely they where wondering why they suddenly had the phones on fire with a whole load of people ending contracts, and some guy from sales said "well, you know, that new TOS, maybe?"
I suspect this was more about money than customer service, accidental addition my bum!.
Agreed! While I still haven't figured out what to do about such notices on paper, I decided to do something about the electronic equivalent where (for example) every time I pay my cell phone bill online, they have a tiny scrolling window with the Terms & Conditions (T&C) with the "accept" and "reject" buttons.
Of course, if you don't actually check, you don't realize what a huge bunch of text there is within the tiny scrolling window. And since I pay the bill monthly, I'm not about to wade through all that text each time to see if they added a "and you owe us your first-born son" clause or something.
I wrote a quick shell script to make a comparison. Now whenever such T&C text shows up, I select the text with my mouse and run the script, which pulls text from the clipboard and compares it to a bunch of text files in a directory (which contain T&C from various web sites, services, etc). It will identify which file contains the old version of the T&C, and check if there are any changes. If there are, it will alert you.
So far I haven't found any service trying to sneak in changes yet, but I'm going to keep my guard up.
If you're interested in the script, I put it in this entry in my journal. Constructive criticism welcome. GPL.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Yes, "WLAN access point". But that's not the issue, is it? The issue is that the JoikuSpot software turns a 3G cell phone into a wireless internet access provider, that anyone can use. (That's my understanding; I haven't use the software.) Someone could get a 3G phone, use it to provide internet access to his entire apartment building, and charge for the access.
Asking someone to leave (other than due to a predeclared time limit or so) is already legally dubious, but now imagine that a) the original agreement was "no limits" and that the terms retroactively got changed without you agreeing to it, that b) the buffet is still advertised as "unlimited" (and without any small print, either), and that c) depending on where you live, the buffet is in fact the ONLY way to get food in your area at all.
I checked the facts, and discovered the error. That's what editors are supposed to do.
Wireless access from a 3G phone allows a cafe owner to provide internet access to anyone in the cafe, and to anyone near the cafe. That's not what those who provide 3G phone service envisioned. I'm not sure it matters, but it is certainly different than just "phone service".
Ultimately, the notion of unlimited use of any resource is unsustainable. Why should Internet bandwidth or cell phone minutes be any different? People will simply think of ways to use the resource more and more, as we have with the Internet with uses as varied as Twitter, which use the resource lightly, to streaming movies which gobble it up.
If AT&T and other Internet and mobile phone providers simply charged a reasonable rate per GB in addition to a fixed per account administrative fee to cover per account administrative costs, the need to cap usage would go away. Big users would find themselves paying much more than users that use it more sparingly, giving them incentive to use less of the resource. This sort of fee structure would be more transparent and resemble the fee structures utilities have been using for years.
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following:
...
(ii) as a substitute or backup for private lines, landlines or full-time or dedicated data connections;
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this seem to imply that you *must also* have dedicated home telephone *and* data service or you're violating their TOS?
for this to be an issue. I tether and pull about 5GB/mo from my non-tether-plan iPhone, mostly web but some video, music, etc. I know several people who do this as well. None of us have ever run into any trouble from this...
My view is that they don't care that much, and they include the clause so that if somebody is using it as their primary internet connection, or otherwise fucking around (hosting Slingbox or something through it) they can cut them off.
IMHO, the person using Skype - even a few times a day - has nothing to worry about.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
There needs to be more regulation on how services are advertised in general. It's pretty retarded to say "unlimited" service when in fact it's nothing of the sort. You should not be required to learn what "unlimited" means in the scope of that contract. Companies should be responsible foe literal terminology.
5?! A MONTH?! Wow. You could use up that cap by downloading 1 or 2 games through STEAM legally.