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Look Forward To Per-Service, Per-Page Fees
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "[Two] companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source. The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube."
One wireless carrier alone like Verizon couldn't implement such a net-killing feature: their customers would abandon them cold. And if all the US carriers adopted that together, that would be the best case to start an antitrust investigation and shake the wireless landscape once and for all.
That being said, you got to look a slide #6: it's one of the best expression of greed I have ever seen.
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Foundrs.com: have you signed up your co-founders yet?
...where corporations are free to fuck you in the ass.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
There was a time, not so long ago, when a good business strategy was to make you product as appealing as possible so that everyone would want to buy it. That's exactly the opposite of today. Today, the business models for the major carriers all focus on just how much they can screw us for before we yelp. They are literally destroying their own market. The reason the internet has been so successful is that once you have paid for access, where you go has been mostly free. This is like Disneyland going back to a ticket system. The only real question is, who will be the "E" ticket rides...
Why shouldn't a company that has built out infrastructure (in some cases taking enormous risk) be free to charge what they want to access that infrastructure?
Because in many/most cases, the company did *not* take any risk whatsoever - or if there was risk, it was still highly mitigated at the taxpayers' expense.
Bits is bits! Bandwidth is not free, but it is only bandwidth that the carriers should be selling. They should not be charging different rates for different flavors of bits. They should not even be aware that the bits are reaching my phone from Google, or YouTube, or my e-mail server. All, they need to know is that I requested a specified number of bits to enter their network to be relayed through to my mobile device.
This is why the cellular carriers should not be omitted from any type of net neutrality rules put into place by the FCC. And this is why the Republicans actions to prevent the FCC from issuing net neutrality rulings needs to be prevented. See http://slashdot.org/story/10/12/17/2045244/Republicans-Create-Rider-To-Stop-Net-Neutrality
You seem to be letting a personal dislike of certain technologies cloud your view. Firstly, net-capable phones are by no means limited to iPhone price territory - a perfectly capable smartphone can easily be found for about £100 unlocked or less than £20/month on a contract. You call Facebook a waste of time, I call it a useful supplement to my other choices of mobile communication (i.e. calls and texts), especially for group conversations or 'broadcast' messaging (think "We're in the pub, feel free to join us", or some such. Not life-or-death, obviously, but a damn useful tool nonetheless). Just because you judge something to be worthless doesn't make it so - plenty of people would consider posting on slashdot to be a waste of time, yet you still do so.
What's much more important, though is that many of us are of the opinion that (aside from edge cases regarding certain peering arrangements or QOS) a MB is a MB, and thus any distinction places artificial restrictions on net access, almost inevitably leading to carriers coercing content providers to pay more for the use of their network despite the fact that upstream was paid at the datacenter and downstream was paid by the consumer. The fact that the first moves in this direction happen to be on mobile connections rather than fixed lines, and that the services mentioned happen not to be ones that you personally use, surely shouldn't be enough to prevent you from seeing that any kind of restriction will lay the groundwork for you, the consumer, being screwed over.