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FCC To Probe Exclusive Mobile Deals
On Tuesday, we discussed news that four US Senators would be looking into the exclusivity deals between carriers and cell phone makers. Apparently, they didn't like what they heard. Reader Ian Lamont writes with an update:
"The Federal Communications Commission is planning on launching an investigation into exclusive handset deals between mobile carriers and handset makers. In a speech on Thursday, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said the agency 'should determine whether some of these arrangements adversely restrict consumer choice or harm the development of innovative devices, and it should take appropriate action if it finds harm.' It's not hard to imagine who might be targeted — at a separate Senate Committee on Commerce hearing on Thursday, much of the discussion centered on AT&T's exclusive deal to carry the iPhone. AT&T claimed 'consumers benefit from exclusive deals in three ways: innovation, lower cost and more choice,' but carriers and senators from states with large rural populations disagreed, saying that their customers had no choice when it came to the iPhone — it's not available because AT&Ts network doesn't reach these areas. One panelist also brought up the Carterfone precedent (PDF), which concerned an 'electrical acoustic coupling device' that a man named Tom Carter developed in the 1950s to let field workers make phone calls using a radio transceiver connected to AT&T's phone network. AT&T, which was then a monopoly, claimed no foreign devices could be connected to its network, but lost when it challenged the Carterfone in court. The result spurred innovation such as the fax machine."
Four Senators want iPhones but don't want to leave Verizon...
As with everything, until it inconveniences a Senator directly they don't see it as a problem
There's AT&Ts recent withdrawal of the iPhone from Pay As You Go availability.
Basically, if you want an iPhone on an affordable plan, you can't get it, because AT&T doesn't offer PAYG and because affordable operators like MetroPCS can't offer one either (yes, I realize MetroPCS isn't GSM, it's just an example).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I've never understood why you could only use certain phones with certain carriers. I've never used an iphone before until yesterday and I really liked it, but was extremely dismayed by being stuck with AT&T.
I've talked with coworkers and friends in the area who use AT&T and most of their responses are about how crappy it is.
Therefore no iphone for me until I can choose another carrier.
The carterfone and that whole line of reasoning has nothing to do with the iphone on competitor networks. I'm not sure what point is trying to be made, like as if the iPhone being able to work on Verizon would lead to some amazing innovation we're missing out on because of an exclusivity deal? I don't think I follow that one. I just don't get it, sorry. It's apples and oranges
Not really much of an improvement.
In response, Roth argued that exclusive deals enable innovation because the operator and manufacturer share the risk. He suggested that operators will ask manufacturers for certain features on phones but manufacturers will often only do so if the operator agrees to buy a certain number of phones, he said.
Corporate trusts are not supposed to decide what features go into products. That is one of the reasons that anti-trust regulation exists. Picking features and rewarding risk takers is the exclusive domain of the silent hand of the market. If you want to share the risk and get some exposure, then buy corporate bonds or non-voting shares from the handset manufacturer that pleases you. It is not a cartel or lateral monopoly's prerogative to manipulate decisions about product features.
The reason it is not the prerogative of trusts, cartels, or monopolies is because they are worse at it than the free market. Demonstrably so:
Did you notice, for example, that it took a computer company -- that had never had anything to do with cellular -- entering the market to finally get a smartphone that didn't suck into the US market?
Did you notice that the second acceptable smartphone came from a search engine company that had also never done cellular before?
Did you notice that that second smartphone got relegated to a third tier provider because the big boys were too busy sucking each others dicks to be bothered with an innovative product?
Did you notice that prior to the iPhone, America had just about the crappiest phones in the entire first world? Tiny little Taiwan was about a decade ahead of where we would be today were it not for Apple -- a complete outsider to your supposedly "innovative" little idiocracy.
You guys have been using your cartel to sit on your lazy, incompetent asses. Just like the auto manufacturers, except that Southeast Asian companies have a much harder time getting variances for cell towers than you, you fat, lazy fucks, so they haven't managed to kick your ass all up and down like they did to the auto makers.
I understand that you want to dictate features and restrain trade, but as it turns out, the free market(*) is a more efficient solution. So shove your transparent cartel rationalization up your ass and get out of my face.
Well, that's what the Senators should have said, anyway.
* Not laissez-faire, not anarchy: Adam Smith's free market, including regulation of anti-competitive behavior. Go re-read The Wealth of Nations if you doubt me.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
1. Be able to buy your phone from anybody who sells them.
:)
More stores selling more phones has to lead to lower prices
2. Then choose your carrier.
Kill the link between phone brand & model and the company that provides your service. And for God's sake kill those 2-year contract extensions!
Maybe these Senators are on the right path -
there's a first time for everything.
Maybe exclusive deals should be like drug patents - must expire after some time. Make it 3 years or so.
Innovation is only 1/2 the rule "tho shalt not adversely restrict consumer choice" is the other 1/2. The carterphone decision can illustrate both.
Apple first went to Verizon but was turned down. AT&T was the only company that would let them do the iPhone, so they got it. Now everyone is crying foul because AT&T is stealing millions of customers. AT&T has every right to keep their deal with Apple. Just wait a few more years and the iPhone will be open for everyone, just as iTuned came to the PC. Apple's best interest is to sell the iPhone everywhere but has an obligation to repay AT&T for making all this possible.
I have not come across any "body" that attempts to lobby, write to local congressman/senators or follow legal channels to help enforce consumer antitrust.
Read: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/div_stats/211491.htm
Quoted:
"There are three main ways in which the federal antitrust laws are enforced: criminal and civil enforcement actions brought by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, civil enforcement actions brought by the Federal Trade Commission and lawsuits brought by private parties asserting damage claims."
This has nothing to do with spectrum, and is not the FCC's jurisdiction. The FTC should be investigating this - and in 2006.
(Unrelated - why does my Karma bonus not work any longer? My Karma is Excellent)
Tag: SuddenOutBreakOfCommonSense - awesome!
AT&T claimed 'consumers benefit from exclusive deals in three ways: innovation, lower cost and more choice,' While guaranteeing monopoly rents to AT&T for anyone that wants an iPhone may actually provide more funding for innovation, economies of scale dictate that more iPhones could be sold if they were allowed on any network, thus lowering unit cost. The contention that less choice = more choice is truly Orwellian. Perhaps AT&T should use as their new slogan, "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Nothing will become of it. Sure there will be some smoke blown to make it look good. But to many positions in the FCC are owned by corporations. That is apparent with the way they have treated telecommunications over the past 20 years. Face it, like Obama, the FCC is just another one of our government agencies that is a whore to corporations.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Actually, that's not capitalism, it's a distortion of capitalism. Capitalism requires free and open markets. Cell carrier siloes are monopolism, not capitalism.
But, just for fun, I'm going to momentarily except your version of capitalism as true, so that I can use the word "ironic."
hen I lived in Viet Nam, an ostensibly communist country, I could buy any cell phone and use it on any carrier's network. They were all unlocked. As far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a carrier-locked cell phone in Viet Nam. Of course, people pay full market price for their cell phones, something which is also capitalist.
The irony is, of course, that the cell phone market in ostensibly communist Viet Nam is far more capitalistic than the cell phone market in the ostensibly capitalist United States, where most phones are simply not available unlocked. If you want an unlocked phone here, DIY is almost the only way to get one.
I save at least $50 on T-mobile using an iPhone and unlocking it (my wife has one also, so it's a shared plan). ATT has taken advantage of the iPhone to tack on the $30 data plan per phone, which is quite a bit more expensive than most other plans with similar service.
I haven't fully decided if the iPhone penetration has reached a point where the government should be regulating them, but for ATT to argue that their deal really helps make things cheaper is bullshit.
I think you are confusing free markets with capitalism. Capitalism is about resource ownership, and the rights relating to those resources.
Free markets are a different beast. You can have capitalism without free markets, e.g., most utilities, where the prices are pretty much set by government regulators and/or access to the market is severely restricted. Heck you could even have free market communism although I am not sure it has been tried.
The cellphone market in the USA is very capitalistic. It's the free market bit that the Senators seem to want to tackle.
They don't pay for insurance coverage... it's just free medical care with highly prioritized and preferential treatment. That's one of the big problems with healthcare -- legislators never see the problem because they never experience it and those who have quickly forget it once they enter that arena
Which is why we if we want the health care problem solved, one essential step will probably be insisting legislators and their staff have no access to any kind of group health care policy.
Mind you some of them are probably well off enough this wouldn't be a particular inconvenience, but the staff thing ought to do it.
Tweet, tweet.
If $10 data plan gives you 1gig, that is equal to more than 8hrs of voice talk per day for 1 month. Which is pretty much to unlimited voice (not including connection costs to LL).
So having that as a fact, no voice plan should ever charge more than $20 per month for unlimited voice, anything higher is pure ripoffs.
Can I get a $10 data plan for a mobile with VOIP?
And surely having one plan for everyone would save marketing and confusing options, no more crap, just one plan, $20 = infinite voice, 1c text, 1gig data on top. Who wouldnt be happy with that besides a cheapass wanting $5 plans.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Or for some senator to have their, or one of their family member's identity stolen... will be fun to see what happens.
"I don't give a damn if you are a United States Senator! Your name is on the TSA watch list, and you're not gettin' on that plane!"
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
The deal with old phones is that there was a FCC mandated sunset of non-e911 capable phones.
You could maintain already activated phones, but couldn't activate - or reactivate those phones after that date.
You're dredging up old news - there are very few people with 6 year old non-e911 phones.
And yes - there are still valid technical reason for not being able to transfer hardware.
You can't use an ATT or T-mobile gsm phone on a Verizon cdma network.
Or an ATT tdma phone on an ATT gsm network.
Cellular carriers are less monopolistic than ever before.
There are fewer players now, but with their expanded networks, they are now most all in direct competition with each other, rather than the almost feudal state that existed in the days of patchwork coverage areas.
[iPhone drops on tower handoffs in SF south bay area.]
Something is clearly wrong with their tower firmware and this is a *recent* problem. It worked flawlessly in these same spots until just a few months ago, and it does reestablish access to the tower with full bars after a few seconds if you sit at one of these "dead spots". ...
The only other possibility would be a baseband crash, but that seems unlikely to occur so consistently during tower handoffs. Also, I often have full bars within a fraction of a second after the call dropping, ...
IMHO another possibility is network saturation. If you have to switch to a new tower or pie-slice because you're losing the old one, and all the slots in the new one are in use, you're hosed until a slot frees up. Park in the "dead zone" and eventually somebody will hang up or move on and the tower will give you a slot. Meanwhile the phone can hear the tower (and its control channel) just fine, so you get bars but no audio. (You'll also be able to send and receive text messages, which are on the control channel. But try to make a new call and you'll get all-trunks-busy.)
This doesn't require a firmware change or anything else other than not having enough cells for the traffic in the area. The "correct" solution is to split the cells up more finely - by installing a bunch of new short range cells to replace a few long-range ones or possibly to split the pie-slices more finely or do steerable antennas.
But both approaches require capital investment in a "lending freeze" economy - where cellphone upgrades are the first thing the consumers cut. The first one also requires regulatory approval for more antenna sites in eco-wacko land where "no nasty carcinogenic electromagnetic fields in MY back yard" is the paradigm of people who don't get the inverse-square law and are perfectly willing to put the antenna of the portable end of the system right up against their skulls.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The fax machine was invented long before the Carterphone issue. It even predates the telephone.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Originally Ma Bell got sued because you could only connect Bell telephones to your landline - nothing else would work. It was decided this was anti competitive. Now all of a sudden carriers *can* decide what devices we use? I think there's precedent for this. Verizon may not manufacture my phone, but there is a Verizon logo on the back of *every* phone I can choose. That seems like an unnecessary amount of control.
The carterfone and that whole line of reasoning has nothing to do with the iphone on competitor networks.
Carterphone is directly applicable.
The carterphone decision is specifically about letting people buy phone equipment of their own choice and requiring the phone companies to let them attach it to the network, rather than renting the limited choice of company-provided equipment.
It led to the "foreign attachments tariffs" and in two steps to the type-approval process, where any equipment that would meet the standards for interoperability could be certified by a lab hired by the manufacturer, then bought and connected by a customer.
(It also led to long-distance service competition, antitrust litigation, and the breakup of the AT&T monopoly: MCI was formed, strung microwave links between cities, hooked 'em up to local phone lines, and let people bypass the AT&T long-distance service by dialing a local number then a customer ID and a long-distance number. AT&T sued, MCI counter-sued on antitrust and won, Southern Pacific Railroad strung fiber beside the tracks for their train signals and formed Sprint to sell the extra bandwidth on their network, ...)
Carterphone was about breaking an anticompetitive tie-in between a network provider and its captive equipment supplier - with wireline rather than wireless equipment. Yes, in this case the bite is on the other carriers more than on the customers of the offending carrier (though the tiny General Telephone company, with its smal islands of local-phone customers, couldn't get Western Electric phones back then - a similar situation). So though the precedent won't transfer directly, IMHO the comparison is still apt.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
all newer phones have to be trackable by the police incase you call 911 and don't know where you are.
If three cells can hear your phone (and they have the necessary equipment to agree on timing and cooperatively measure it) they can locate you within feet. Better than remotely-interrogatable GPS in the phone.
If two cells can hear your phone (and ditto) and understand the delay of the phone model's response to a ping, they can do the same but put you in one of two spots - where you are and the mirror-image point with the line between the cells as a mirror. (Actually on a vertical circle which intersects the ground at those two points - so you could look a tad farther away than you are if you are hang-gliding or on a skyscraper roof.) If they don't have a good measure of ping time they can still spot you on a hyperbola.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do something about Verizon saying "you may not use a smart phone without paying $30/month above and beyond your voice plan for data even if you don't want to use our data network". The phones have WiFi - that's what I want. Period. I don't want data. I want a smart phone and I don't want to sure the web using your network. That should be my right to choose.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Simple.
The only ones who can lobby are the ones made rich by existing favoritism.
Positive feedback loop.
It wasn't that non-AT&T phones wouldn't work, there -were- no phones except AT&T phones manufactured by Western Electric, an AT&T subsidiary. Not only that, AT&T owned 100% of phones. You could only rent them. If you were in possession of a Western Electric phone not rented from AT&T, it was stolen. No non-AT&T devices could legally be connected to the PSTN, because this (AT&T FUD) would damage the network. There were no RJ-11 modular phone jacks, phones were connected to terminal blocks, and it was illegal for anybody but an AT&T technician to screw or unscrew the two little red and green wires. If you wanted more than one phone in your home or apartment, you had to rent another one from AT&T for the then-high price of maybe $3/month, and AT&T would come and install it for the then-high price of maybe $20. In the seventies, four things happened. First, phone phreaks like your Dad started collecting phones that had fallen from trucks and installing them for friends and neighbors (and Ma Bell would monitor how many amperes were drawn by telephone bells to catch people with illegal phones). Second, AT&T was broken up by the courts for antitrust violations (it has now mostly reconstituted itself). Third, companies like MCI began competing with AT&T for long distance connections, driving the cost of phone calls down, way down. Fourth, the FCC opened up the network, the RJ-11 modular phone was introduced, and people were allowed for the first time to connect non-AT&T phones and other devices. AT&T still bitched and moaned about the possibility of current overload, and for a while competing phone manufacturers had to label their devices with a Ringer Equivalnce Number, but this went away with the introduction of electronic ringers.
The introduction of modular phones didn't lower local phone bills any, no advance in technology ever has (except for VOIP). Call waiting, call forwarding, and caller ID were invented circa 1980, and to this day have not been significantly improved.
Parent is not a troll; what he says is exactly what happened. No other carrier was willing to work with Apple on features like visual voicemail, unlimited data transfer, or end user activation, and no other carrier would have agreed to give up any say in what applications would be allowed to run.
People forget just how crippled cell phones were before the iPhone. Carriers insisted on turning off GPS, Bluetooth, and other features that were already supported in hardware on the phones they sold in their own stores.
At the time, AT&T's service was dead last in consumer satisfaction surveys. My understanding is that they were literally Apple's last resort; all of the other carriers had told them to get lost. AT&T wisely saw the iPhone as a way to get their act together and regain lost prestige in the marketplace.
I'm not exactly an AT&T fanboy, but that's the way it went down.
In the UK, whole departments are deployed to ensure the offerings can never be like-for-like compared - AFAIK that's partly to withhold that opportunity for customers but more so that regulation doesn't get much grip.
If they want to drill through that game I wish them luck - they're up against years of well practised obfuscation..
Insert
your Government gets a socialized medicine scheme and nobody else does?
Want an iPhone, then get one and unlock it on your carrier..simple.. It's not just the iPhone, every carrier has exclusive deals..Blackberry Storm is Verizon only, but i'm not whining about that.. Your probably the same people that download movies with bit torrent so you don't have to pay for them.
What hav eyou seen that the government does well, besides starting wars? I've got government health care and it's damn near killed me. Believe me, the quality of medicine does drop if the practicioners can't be sued. While we do need tort reform, government health care will only make the problems worse and more expensive. Next time you think about goverment health care, remember your last trip to the DMV.
The Carterfone precedent of 1950s. ... The result spurred innovation such as the fax machine.
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain is often credited with the first fax patent in 1843.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
You are lying, first of all. Capitalism does NOT require "free and open markets" as defined by you. Capitalism is served just fine by a new carrier having the ability to enter the market. Anybody with sufficient money and motivation can start a new cell phone company - ergo the market is "open". I know you "more capitalist than thou socialists" think you make a convincing argument here, but I'm afraid the definition of "capitalism" doesn't mean what you think it means.
I'm American, I have a "right" to have an iPhone! Another brand phone with similar features won't do, I insist on the Apple (TM) iPhone(TM)! Whaaa! I'm calling my senator!
What a bunch of fucking crybabies.
bribes,,,,er,,,"campaign contributions". As soon as the right palms get enough greese on them this "issue" will go away faster than due on the morning grass.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Capitalism is the separation of other people from their wealth with the goal of increasing your own wealth.
Anything that interferes with that goal is socialism.
Therefore of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Conquest, War, and Famine are clearly capitalists, because you can use them to leverage wealth from others.
Death, however, is clearly a socialist - and perhaps even a communist, as he permanently halts the transfer of wealth from or to whoever he has an appointment with.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
You're not only the liar here, you're stupid besides.
It is more like a deferred payment of the phone.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.