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EU Announces Deal To End All Wireless Roaming Charges (venturebeat.com)
The European Union took a big step toward creating a Digital Single Market today with the announcement of a deal that would end roaming charges for mobile consumers across the continent. From a report on VentureBeat: The plan had originally been announced two years ago when the European Commission unveiled an ambitious plan to create a DSM that would unify the continent's fractured rules around digital content, ecommerce, and mobile communications. However, the plan to end roaming charges across boarders ran into stiff opposition from telecom carriers worried about profits and consumers who were concerned about limits it imposed on data usage. As a result, the proposal appeared dead at one point last year. But negotiators said today they had reached an agreement on technical issues like sharing carrier costs across networks and a gradual phase-out of caps on data usage.
HTTPS can be cached. Usually CDNs do precisely this. For caching content on the local disk, its unchanged as well. And in corporate networks, its possible to have MITM'ing proxies, adding certificates to the trust store. Everything still possible.
Roundabout, but effective. The problem is vertical integration. The carrier owns the towers, and sells the handsets. As a result, if you want a specific plan, you're stuck with the limited phones that carrier supports and the tower network that carrier uses. You want these things to be separate. Companies which own towers compete with each other. Companies which sell with service compete with each other. And companies which sell handsets compete with each other.
I'm usually critical of the EU's (over)regulation. But this is one thing they're doing right - maximizing competition so the free market can decide who is best and who deserves to go bankrupt.
Common Carrier all fiber, cable, cellular networks, everyone runs over the common carrier, no more fragmentation, no more limitations as all companies pay the same rate to run over the same equipment....
And no more incentive to maintain, improve, or differentiate that infrastructure. It's like arguing that we should consolidate the food production industry so we can have a consistent, efficiently manufactured Soylent food product everywhere in the EU to fulfill your nutritional needs. One size fits all tends to be pretty ugly. I hear they're coming out with Soylent Green in a few months. Yum!
There was collusion in the market. The actors were given ample time to correct themselves. They didn't.
Perhaps this is not the Invisible Hand Fixes All hill to die on.
Normal people don't need "unlimited free international roaming", and it's easy enough to just get a local SIM card
Allow me to explain Europe to you. Within 2 hours in the car I can travel to 4 different countries, going straight through one of them. Within 2 hours in a plane and for the cost of an averagely good meal (35eur) I can fly across half of the continent. On the way to work every day I see cars and trucks with a myriad of license plates from all over. Many people I know have relatives in other countries. Everyone I know country hops from holiday to holiday. I actually know a few people who commute between countries daily for work, and they get to work faster than I do.
Just how many SIM cards do you expect us "normal" people to buy?