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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?
I think we all understand that bits from some sites clog up more of the tubes than bits from other sites. I know netflix bits are much heavier than fluffy fark bits.
We all new the free ride couldn't go on for ever, shoving our super dense bittorrent bits down the pipes to the detriment of all the innocent cnn.com users and their non-obstructive bits.
Finally my telco can start making real money, like they deserve after all these years of selflessly giving away bandwidth.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
...where corporations are free to fuck you in the ass.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
If my cell provider implements this, I'll switch carriers. If they all try this, then I'll just drop to a pay as you go phone without internet access. Checking my email and surfing the web for those rare moments when I'm not near a desktop or laptop are a luxury I can do without. I can think of many other better uses for the ~$150/mo I'm paying now for multiple lines.
https://slashdot.org STILL redirects to http://slashdot.org./
This has an easy fix. Create an account, activate it, log in, and subscribe to Slashdot, and it won't redirect you back to an unencrypted connection anymore.
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.
Its one thing to charge per MB, quite another to be a company like AT&T and add surcharges specifically for using Skype or other competing services like video downloads.
I wonder what kind of reaction they'd get if they proposed a surcharge for using the iTunes store.
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.
Your comment demonstrates an obvious lack of historical knowledge. Read The $200 Billion Rip-Off by Cringely, to get a brief introduction to what you were too young to understand or over looked.
Fifteen years ago my community, after their repeated requests to the cable and telcos to build a Fiber Optic cable system to bring affordable HIGH BANDWIDTH to every citizen were rebuffed, decided to begin building it themselves as a public utility. (Our electricity is owned by city and we pay 6 cents/kwh). I watched as they trenched their way through my yard and buried FO cable. The cable and telcos lobbied Congress whining about "unfair" competition. Congress agreed and passed a low preventing local and state governments from "competing" against the cable and telcos. Cringely explains the rest, but failed to mention that while Congress FUNDED the cable and telcos to complete the FO project, they did NOT put performance clauses in the bill, so the cable and telcos took the money and stuffed it into their greedy pockets. To help the cable and telcos extract even more profits from their ancient Copper wire technology Congress REDEFINED "high" bandwidth to include any connection that was 200Kb/s or faster.
So now, in France, a citizen can pay $30/month and receive a 40Mb/s HIGH bandwidth Internet connection which includes 24/7/365 phone calls to anyone in France (and economical rates to other countries), and 200 channel TV.
I pay $72/mon for a 12Mb/s Internet connection, thankfully uncapped, but no phone nor TV. I do use Skype to talk for free to other VOIP users, and 2 cents/min to any cellphones or land lines in most of the Free World, and I can watch expried TV shows on HULU for $8/mon, but 12Mb/s is no where near 40Mb/s.
Now, the ISPs want to charge extra for Skype and Netflix bytes. IF you think it will end there you have a brick for a brain. Greed knows NO bounds. They'll find ways to justify charging for other types of data streams: VPN connections, encrypted data, cloud database data, etc..., then they'll tier the stream types to ratchet up the profit margins even higher, and all of it on ANCIENT Copper Wire technology. In the background their OWN data pipes are being converted to Fiber Optic, but the stuff streaming out to you will have a Copper segment. They need that bottle-neck to justify their robbery.
You elected your Congressmen to serve you. In the past they formed "watch dog" agencies to keep an eye on the corporations. Now, the corporations bribe the Congressmen to pass laws favorable to their profits, and the FCC, FDA, and DOJ are now instruments of enforcing corporate policy.
Didn't you ever wonder how President Obama, elected by a LARGE majority to fulfill his promise to clean up Health Insurance and the medical industry, was stymied by his OWN Democrat party members, the majority of whom took bribes from the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry to maintain the status quo, to say nothing of insuring their own re-election so their own ride on the Federal gravy train wouldn't come to an end.
Welcome to the Corporate State. And you though you were living in a Republic or a Democracy, where your vote counted and the Constituion meant something. Silly you.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!