Free Press Sues FCC Over Discrepancy In Net Neutrality Rules 71
hypnosec writes "The Free Press has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, challenging the net neutrality rules laid out by the regulator. The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, claims the rules are different for fixed line and mobile wireless broadband. According to the rules, mobile wireless carriers are not allowed to block voice and other applications that compete with their own services, but other than that, they are free do to what they want."
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Interesting)
No, instead, they raise rates for everything else and discount their own. That's the "fair" way to do it.
It reminds me of something a particular apartment management company has been doing ( these bastards [apartmentratings.com] ). The law says they cannot charge ridiculous late fees to people and has limited what they can charge for various things. But, the law did not prevent them from offering huge discounts for paying rent "on time" and so that's what they did. But now it's worse than it was before! How? Well, first is the very large effective late fee (which is the loss of $100+ discount + the normal late fee) but then here's the fun part -- these 'discounts' accumulate and they can be made to blow up on you like a giant usurious bomb! So, let's say you need to move because your job is relocating you. Well, you can usually give the customary 30 days notice, but they don't subscribe to that policy... they are more like 60 to 90 day notice is required! And then they want to charge you lease breaking fees which is equal to the remainder of the lease + all discounts previously applied or something like that.
Apartment dwellers almost never have enough money to get legal representation and people without money don't have the ear of the government either. So these abuses will continue until something reaches a breaking point.
Seems I went off topic? Well kinda -- the practice of "raising prices + applying discounts" would likely be the approach the wireless carriers would take... you know, just like "friends and family" plans they use to get entire groups of people to move to their service who then become reluctant to change to other services because all of their friends and family are on the one service.
Gotta love the clever ways they use and abuse their customers...