When the government sues for stuff like that, where does the money go? I mean, it's a punishment to have to pay, sure, but why does the government get the money? Shouldn't the people being screwed be the ones getting that?
[deleted]
T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#32What is the status on T-Mobile offering unlimited data usage from select sources (Binge On program)? I can stream as much (well, I guess up to 17Gb) data as I want so long as it's from their list of approved sources which allow throttling at 480 resolution. It feels absurd that this is how they operate, rather than just allowing unlimited data at say 3G speeds (rather than the throttled data rate which is at most 2G but in practice is unusable).
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/10/28/net.neutralit...
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#33It's great that the FCC does this for cell carriers, but they still are letting the data caps apply on home connections, which is going to do nothing except increase profits and decrease innovation.
This is completely false.
If you look at how businesses generally work, they're trying to get a certain amount of revenue in order to balance their budget and make a profit. Then they decide how to get it.
Data caps are fantastic. Because it means when they're raising their prices, they're charging the users who most use it, rather than just raising the price for everyone.
If you're being asked to pay for overage on a wired line plan, it means you're a 1%er in the Internet world. You're a burden on the system with how much you use, and you're upset you're being asked to pay a little more than everyone else.
Basically, people opposed to data caps are like Wall Street execs complaining their taxes are higher than everyone else's.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#34For anyone finding this ruling confusing as I initially did: this isn't about T-Mobile unlimited plans that slow down from LTE to EDGE speeds after a certain amount of data; that was well-advertised, and not apparently at issue. This is about a different, entirely unadvertised process by T-Mobile on unlimited plans of de-prioritizing traffic entirely after a certain point (~17GB), making it appear as though the network is simply more congested for the user after they've used a large amount of data.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#35I'm a little saddened to see the direction T-Mobile is headed with their plans. When I switched to Project Fi last year my T-Mobile unlimited plan was $70/mo. That included actual HD video, and LTE tethering. Now the equivalent plan (T-Mobile One+) is $90/mo, and that just gets you "unlimited HD day passes" which you have to remember to toggle every day if you want video that isn't 480p. What's even scarier to me is…
My inability to "script" my phone is really starting to hinder my hacker-ness. This seems like something you could build into your phone. Every day when you first interact with your phone, have tasker or something else fire off a job that auto-enables your unlimited hd day passes. Does anyone have good introduction documentation to either: writing scripts for tasker, or writing your own android applications when you…
Scripting Layer 4 Android provides a reasonable facade for a lot of APIs that are available to a ton of languages via a socket. It has out of the box support for perl and python as well as some other languages.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#36$48 million seems like a slap on the wrist. T-Mobile made $32 billion in revenue in 2015 and just posted $479 million in profit. I wish I could feel like these fines actually acted as a deterrent.
The best treatment that lobbying money can buy.
Not really. The supreme court has repeatedly said there are constitutional limits on punitive damage.
In fact, for federal common law, it's about a 1:1 ratio, and for everything else, it's supposed to be "single digit multipliers".
See exxon shipping v. baker and following cases.
So, of course, agencies keep their fines within precedent because they actually want to be able to defend them in court.
Ignorance is bliss though, blame lobbying.
(since some have privately asked: no, i think this kind of restriction is pretty much BS, but it is the law of the land, and it is one of the main reasons agency fines are so low in cases like this. The amount t-mobile gained by throttling unlimited data is pretty small, at least if their percent of users going over x amount of data numbers are correct)
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#37I'm a little saddened to see the direction T-Mobile is headed with their plans. When I switched to Project Fi last year my T-Mobile unlimited plan was $70/mo. That included actual HD video, and LTE tethering. Now the equivalent plan (T-Mobile One+) is $90/mo, and that just gets you "unlimited HD day passes" which you have to remember to toggle every day if you want video that isn't 480p. What's even scarier to me is…
I'll just leave this here: https://boingboing.net/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunn...
Huh. Thanks for this. How are the speeds in major cities?
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#38What is the status on T-Mobile offering unlimited data usage from select sources (Binge On program)? I can stream as much (well, I guess up to 17Gb) data as I want so long as it's from their list of approved sources which allow throttling at 480 resolution. It feels absurd that this is how they operate, rather than just allowing unlimited data at say 3G speeds (rather than the throttled data rate which is at most 2G…
I'm really surprised this hasn't caused more of a Net Neutrality uproar, since it's essentially the worst case scenario. If you don't pay T-Mobile to be one of their approved partners, your service is punished by costing customers more money for the same amount of data.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#39$48 million seems like a slap on the wrist. T-Mobile made $32 billion in revenue in 2015 and just posted $479 million in profit. I wish I could feel like these fines actually acted as a deterrent.
Comparing the fine to total revenue and total profit is completely meaningless. What's relevant is how much they were saving in infrastructure costs by throttling those users. E.g. If they saved less than $24 million and had a >50% chance of getting caught, this works perfectly well as a deterrent no matter how large there overall profits were.
Very good point. I just hope that the penalties considerably outweigh the risks.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#40I see the word "unlimited" on a lot of hosting providers. Give me access to the dd command and we'll see how long that theory lasts. I honestly find it, always and everywhere, to be deceptive marketing. There is no such thing as unlimited resources.
Most unlimited plans are outlined in the AUP/TOS. Further so long as you are not impacting other customers in the shared hosting, it is not generally an issue. That said, I do prefer to know my limits
On the contrary, the TOS limitations are often an issue. They often regulate what you can use the data or hosting for. For instance, unlimited hosting plans often prohibit running download sites or being used as backup storage for yourself, to avoid you from using a lot of space or a lot of bandwidth. They also usually prohibit you from running cron jobs or game servers or chat bots which can be higher on other server resources.
"Unlimited" hosting plans are effectively geared for basic personal or small business websites only. And if you go over some soft limits they're almost certainly monitoring, they'll find an excuse in the TOS to disable your account.