FCC To Fine AT&T $100M For Throttling Unlimited Data Customers 205
New submitter Wargames writes: According to the article in the New York Times, AT&T is getting fined $100,000,000 for its doublespeak redefinition of the word "Unlimited". The FCC says AT&T failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised and that these actions violated the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order. “Unlimited means unlimited,” Travis LeBlanc, the F.C.C.’s chief of the enforcement bureau, said in a statement on Wednesday. “As today’s action demonstrates, the commission is committed to holding accountable those broadband providers who fail to be fully transparent about data limits.”
$100,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
What does that amount to? A month? A week's worth of revenue? Show some teeth dammit! Revoke their charter...
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Informative)
2014 revenue, 134 billion
EBITDA 32.14 billion
So if this fine happened last year, their EBITDA would have only been 32.04 billion, a drop of 0.3%
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Woo hoo, a $15 (effective) fine on AT&T. That'll show them.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Are building and materials part of COGS?
The answer is yes to both....
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.The point is, since you quite obviously missed it, that the accounting and tax rules for businesses and individuals are very different, so any argument that punishments must be made on an equitable basis are invalid.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you tax an individual's gross income but tax a business only on its profit? Oh, wait. That's exactly how it works, isn't it.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
The same method doesn't work for businesses because they vary so much in expenses they incur to operate. But why should you even tax a business? Businesses don't consume or produce anything - the people working at them do. A business is just a paper shell representing a group of people. If you tax the business, the money just comes from the employees (lower wages) and customers (higher prices).
Taxing businesses creates a contradiction if you believe in "no taxation without representation." Either you can tax businesses and therefore businesses deserve representation in government. Or you recognize that a business is just a group of people working together, and those people are already taxed and can vote, so it doesn't make sense to tax them more just because they've decided to work together, and therefore a businesses does not deserve representation in government.
(Some business taxes make sense. But these are generally taxes to recoup regulatory costs like excise taxes on vehicles, or to encourage/discourage certain behaviors like pollution taxes.)
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So what you are saying is that the owners of the business should be taxed on the companies income. Lets see, if I suddenly put a million dollars in the bank, the taxman will come calling and take a good bit. So if Apple puts 40 billion into the bank, the shareholders should have to pay their share of it. Sound like a good idea, Apple can bank billions in some island somewhere and the share holders can pay the taxes. Should really help companies get investment and do wonders for the stock market.
We can take
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's not close to what you can deduct as a company, where you can write of just about any item as a cost of doing business. Corporate retreat in Hawaii? Business expense! Private gym and sauna next to the private parking garage for upper management? Business expense!
You can't do the same thing as an individual, writing off your every purchase as your cost of living.
My Spidey sense is detecting an ascent into the wingnutosphere....
Trite nonsense, if it's a tax on profit. Such a tax could be 95% or .005%, and it would result in neither of the above options. Because prices are always set to maximize profits, and wages are always set to minimize payroll. If companies could jack up prices without losing too many customers, or cut wages without losing too many employees, they would go ahead and do it, not wait for a tax.
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For an employee, gross income and "profit" are very close as they do not resell anything. Also, in many countries individuals get to deduct various profession-related costs from their income, or sometimes a fixed amount to cover costs of work (costs like commuting, mandatory suits/uniforms, etc). An individual's "profit" is basically their "taxable income" - this may be salary, income from investments, income from property value increases, etc, depending on the laws of their locality.
So to be fair, in deter
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Um... that's not how we fine people (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the grandparents numbers are a bit off. Min wage is $7.25 hr. About 15% of that goes to taxes that no poor person can get out of (even accounting for earned income credits which is really meant to offset other taxes the poor pay). It's about $6.16/hr take home (profit) or about $37 bucks.
So if we were to fine AT&T the way we fine the poor it would be about $1.3 billion, give or take.
But OTOH the poor person didn't make any profit from speeding (unless you want to count getting to their shitty job as "profit", but that's just being a vindictive jerk if you're gonna do that). The reason us libtardos want to find Corps way, way more than the pleabs is so that it _hurts_. You have to fine them more money than they made doing the illegal activity or they're going to do it again. They have to, since it's profitable and corporations have a legal requirement to do whatever's most profitable for the shareholders (they really do, look it up).
See, that $500 bucks _hurts_ the guy at McDonalds. It might even be what turns him into a hobo when he can't pay his rent. At the very least he's not going to do _anything_ except work and eat (and not much of that) for the next 6 months to a year. He'll remember the pain of losing that money and think twice about speeding. Let's give AT&T that feeling. Then maybe we'll stop seeing crap like this happen.
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Dice Holdings sucks ass.
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The problem is that you think corporate profits are the same as personal gross income. Either compare profits of both, or gross income of both.
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Clown #1:Everyone is so pissed about these bills, their speed is terrible, and there is no coverage indoors, plus that whole NS...whatever thing.
Clown #2: What do we do about these perceptions of problems? if they don't go away, I won't be able to buy that new electric motorcycle, to go with my Tesla!
Clown #3: Oooh, Oooh! I know, we'll have the FC, uh what were they called again? Fine us...someth
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Serious question: Is that actually a proportionate penalty for the infraction?
For example, how does it compare to the revenues and/or profits that AT&T derived from customers who were on the supposedly unlimited plan over the period when the misleading advertising was going on?
If the effect of this is to cost the service provider at least the amount of extra profit they made, relative to what they would have received if those customers had been on the closest available limited plan that provided the relevant data volumes, then it's an effective deterrent.
If the cost to the service provider is significantly more than that, then it's a meaningful penalty, particularly if they are subject to further fines of the same magnitude or greater for any subsequent repetition of this kind of behaviour.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Informative)
From Arstechica's article [arstechnica.com]:
"Although the company no longer offers unlimited plans to new customers, it allows current unlimited customers to renew their plans and has sold millions of existing unlimited customers new... contracts for data plans that continue to be labeled as 'unlimited,'" the FCC said. "In 2011, AT&T implemented a 'Maximum Bit Rate' policy and capped the maximum data speeds for unlimited customers after they used a set amount of data within a billing cycle. The capped speeds were much slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised and significantly impaired the ability of AT&T customers to access the Internet or use data applications for the remainder of the billing cycle."
So as a rough order of magnitude estimate "millions of customers" equates to $100's of millions of revenue a month, over nearly 5 years, so they made roughly billions to 10's of billions of dollars on these accounts over the time period. And that is excluding customers that moved to a different plan as a result of the throttling.
The FCC said it believes millions of customers have been affected by AT&T's throttling, with speed reductions that "imped[ed] their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video." On average, customers' speeds were slowed for 12 days per monthly billing cycle, the FCC said.
These customers were impacted for about a 1/3 of the time, and if you value the throttled service at half the value of the promised service, that comes to 100s of millions to billions of dollars that they were overcharging. So the fine is on the low end of reasonable.
Note, that the FTC is also investigating this and may require AT&T to refund money to their customers in addition to paying the FCC fine.
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Thanks for the data. So if this actually affected millions of their customers (i.e., they didn't just have millions on that plan but millions who actually did not receive the level of service they paid for) and it was ongoing for a period of years (i.e., this wasn't some slip up for a single ad run, it was a sustained campaign of misleading information) then the fine in question is negligible. That's a pity.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It doesn't matter how long they evaded law enforcement with double-speak. They were violating the law and should be held accountable for the full magnitude of the crime they've committed. That's how justice works in this country.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It doesn't matter how long they evaded law enforcement with double-speak. They were violating the law and should be held accountable for the full magnitude of the crime they've committed. That's how justice works in this country.
"If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." Fight Club narrator
Fines like this are a calculated cost of doing business, to be sure, but they are also an important part of punishment theatre. Companies of this size negotiate fine amounts and punishments as forms of appeasement when caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, every Wall Street banker ever, etc.
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"Fines like this are a calculated cost of doing business, to be sure, but they are also an important part of punishment theatre. Companies of this size negotiate fine amounts and punishments as forms of appeasement when caught with their hands in the cookie jar. "
We need to stop blaming the evil corporations. Let there be shame. When stuff like this becomes public people should jump carriers. Let THAT get factored in to the cost of doing business.
If we're too lazy to jump to another carrier then it's our
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL.
You just cited one of the stupidest legal fictions ever created. Yes, everyone knows it. Yes, it's been around since forever. And yes, it's ridiculous.
How many federal statutes are there? Trick question: no one even knows. You could spend your whole life reading the Federal Register and you still wouldn't know the whole law. And even if you did, there are statutes that incorporate the entirety of "foreign law" by reference ("No animal may be transported in violation of any state, federal, or foreign law."). So you'd need to memorize every law in the world.
There needs to be some sense to this imputation of knowledge. "I didn't know it was illegal to kill someone" is retarded; of course you did. "I didn't know it was illegal to break into that guy's house"; again, ridiculous.
"I didn't know that Honduras prohibited transporting lobsters in clear containers, rather than opaque ones." That's not at all ridiculous. And someone was convicted for that and sentenced to jail.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" comes from a time when mob justice was close to the only justice. "We all think you did something bad, so you must have known it was bad, too!" There are still many crimes that have the quality that "you must have known you were doing something wrong, even if you couldn't cite the statute".
But there are others that, while valid criminal laws, really should only be enforced against people in some profession or other. If you own a company that catches, kills, and sells for food various types of wildlife, you should know if the state you're hunting in adds a turtle to the protected species list.
If you're some restaurant owner halfway across the country, and you just bought a shipment of turtles for your turtle soup from some company you'd been doing business with for years ... you probably shouldn't be held liable. You would think, quite rightly, you didn't really have to worry about endangered species law since you're buying from a legit corporation, and you know that the species isn't endangered because it's one of the most common turtles in the country so you didn't think to check if Rhode Island had changed its law recently.
This happened, too: some kids lobbied the state government to make this common turtle the "state reptile", and the state did, and the state's laws said "all state animals are protected species", and federal law prohibits trafficking protected species across state lines, and some company was negligent, and some restaurant owner was unaware the company was negligent, and some federal prosecutor was a douchebag, and now this poor guy is a federal criminal for making turtle soup using a turtle species which isn't at all endangered and which isn't protected in his state, at the federal level, or in any state except one random state that thinks it's cute to let 4th graders write state laws . He went to jail because of a Rube Goldberg-esque legal dominoes game.
There are too many laws, and society is too complicated, for us to keep saying "ignorance of the law is no excuse". You're right, but you shouldn't be.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re the Honduras thing:
The woman convicted was in the US, did no business with Honduras, did nothing other than RECEIVE a shipment of lobsters from a company that had ultimately gotten them from Honduras. She didn't know this: do you know what country the stuff you buy from Walmart ultimately comes from?
And the shipment was in clear containers. And the Honduran government filed a brief saying that that law had been invalidated by the Honduran courts. And she still went to jail.
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Interesting commentary. Yea, I've always felt this way... Couldn't you have skipped the wall of text laced with insult and just posted the quote above....or at least just skip the lacing? You're not an AC. Show some tact.
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I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be insulting. I said the legal fiction was stupid, not you, and I didn't mean to say you were.
I think years of reading and commenting on Slashdot has made my comments a little more confrontational than I intend sometimes.
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Me too. I try to keep a handle on it, but when the urge becomes unbearable, I'm ashamed to admit that I'll check the post anonymously box.
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Oh, will you two just shut up and kiss already?
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The ones standing over there between Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? They don't exist, and neither do these "insults" you imagined reading.
Re: $100,000,000 (Score:2)
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AT&T knew full well what they were doing was illegal. They couldn't just cut off the plans mid-contract (though they could and did stop offering new contracts) without giving customers the ability to break contract without penalty. Which is why they kept calling them "Unlimited" plans as they started implementing limits.
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There are too many laws, and society is too complicated, for us to keep saying "ignorance of the law is no excuse". You're right, but you shouldn't be.
Your argument may work for individuals (though even there it's tricky: "sorry sir, I didn't know it's illegal to kill my neighbour for disturbing my night's rest by making too much noise when having sex with his mistress"), not so much for big companies with lots of lawyers on the payroll. Those really should know better. They really should check relevant laws when they say "unlimited" yet do pose some "fair use policy" or even hard limits on an account, to make sure their advertising is still within the la
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Or not so much? [eenews.net] The other side of the story is that the case was based on under-sized lobsters (i.e. overfishing), not the packaging. Sounds like one of those fables cooked up by dishonest right wingers to be repeated in spite of the facts. Like Clinton being responsible for Ruby Ridge (happened before he was el
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AT&T assumed that their advertising was fine until told otherwise.
Then perhaps they should have consulted lawyers and/or technical experts, given that apparently many millions of dollars were at stake? Given the obviously factually incorrect statement and the resources available to AT&T, I would not be inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt about their motives here, and I rather doubt any court is going to in the inevitable legal action to follow either.
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Then perhaps they should have consulted lawyers and/or technical experts, given that apparently many millions of dollars were at stake?
Did you ever read the first Scott Adams Dilbert book? He says (I think I'm quoting but it may be a paraphrase) that "the goal of every engineer is to retire without being blamed for a major disaster." As much as that might be true of engineers, it is 10x true of corporate lawyers.
A company the size of AT&T has literally thousands of lawyers out of its 250,000 employees. I don't know if you have ever worked with corporate lawyers (at least at very very large companies). But most of the time, they cover t
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AT&T assumed that their advertising was fine until told otherwise.
AT&T knew full well what they were doing when they advertised something as "unlimited" and then put limitations on it, and if they didn't, then they're not competent to make public statements and should be prohibited from doing so since they have demonstrated their inability to handle the awesome responsibility of the first amendment, and used their corporate right to freedom of expression for fraud. When someone misuses a firearm we take away their constitutional right to keep and bear arms; why should
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not clear what the correct period should be. AT&T assumed that their advertising was fine until told otherwise. If the FCC had fined them after 1 day of misleading advertising, then AT&T would have paid a small fine and stopped. It turns out that the FCC reacted more slowly. AT&T shouldn't be punished proportionally with the slowness of law enforcement.
You should try that excuse after you get a speeding ticket: Sure officer, I knew that going 100mph was against the law, but if you would have stopped me at 56 mph instead of taking your time and waiting until I reached 100mph, the fine would be much smaller. I shouldn't be punished proportionally with the slowness of law enforcement
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A week of revenue? Hah, that's a week of hidden fee revenue.
Or atleast it will be starting tomorrow.
Re:$100,000,000 (Score:5, Funny)
What does that amount to? A month? A week's worth of revenue? Show some teeth dammit! Revoke their charter...
I'm more interested in how much $100 M could have upgraded their infrastructure to *actually* provide said services...
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I like how you think that a telecommunications company might use excess cash to upgrade their service. That's funny right there.
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They should and it's the smart thing to do, because if they don't and the competition does, they lose out. And if they upgrade but the competition does not, they're the ones that can offer the better plans at the lower rates and end up laughing all the way to the bank.
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Exactly. That's why fines should never be in fixed dollar amounts. They should be in percentages; either of revenue or assets (no considering net anything, to easy to hide true value that way). I suspect if AT&T were faced with, say, a 13 billion, it probably would very quickly alter its behavior.
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That's difficult because you have to scale it to the number of industries, or the breadth within an industry, that they're involved in. Otherwise a larger company, which commits more infractions just by virtue of the fact that has more employees and is doing more things, is going to get hit harder per infraction while a smaller company can get away with far worse per-employee.
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Considering this amount I don't think it's a law-prescribed number. Like with traffic fines which is generally a prescribed amount: park where you're not allowed to, and pay $100 or whatever.
TFS doesn't say how the judge comes to this $100M, but I may assume he did take things like revenue or profit into account. After all, fining a smaller company such an amount would put them out of business, which is not what this fine is meant to do. It's meant to correct behaviour, not to kill. Now whether $100M is rea
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Do you really think a $100 million dollar fine is going to be a significant deterrent to a company like AT&T? Now, a multibillion dollar fine would likely lead to shareholders forcing the board out, the firing of pretty much all the senior management, and certainly would inform the company's future governance structures that they had better bloody well behave.
If megacorporations can just treat fines like a tax, then what the hell is the point? This judgement should have been ten times larger if the inte
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As long as the shareholders also think $100M is small change and don't care about the lost profit/dividents, nothing is going to change indeed. The fine should indeed be far higher than the profits made thanks to the false advertising - however without in-depth knowledge of the company at stake you nor me can say anything sensible about whether this fine is reasonable or not.
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Revoke their charter.
This may surprise you, but the federal and state governments cannot unilaterally "revoke the charter" of a corporation without cause. We live in a nation of laws, where the government has limited power, and handing the executive branch the ability to appropriate the private property of a corporation's shareholders in this dramatic way would increase the power of the executive branch of government dramatically. If history is any guide, this power would be used capriciously, against corporations unpopular f
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If the law provides for that penalty (which it doesn't), and it's not so disproportionate the courts would refuse to enforce it (which they might).
I caught you speeding 5 miles an hour. I'm revoking your driver's license forever. Your driver's license is a government license, not an entitlement. So I can be a dick and revoke it whenever I want, because I'm the governor.
I think I'll go revoke all the driver's licenses of black people now. Or maybe I can't do that because of the 14th Amendment. People wi
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You're talking about the government seizing private property. AT&T isn't some otherworldly entity; it has shareholders who own it. In the 1890s, when this power you allege actually existed, due process protections may not have been incorporated against the states yet. But now they are.
You're not going to get a court to agree that the executive branch can seize AT&T's entire assets because it violated some minor advertising regulation.
Civil asset forfeiture is an abomination and should be abolishe
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I wonder, if I were to make a bunch of money selling placebo pills claiming they have "unlimited health benefits", over several years, what sort of trouble would I be in? Somehow I doubt they'd investigate, then eventually tell me that I shouldn't confuse "limited" with "unlimited" from now on, then when I ignore them only fine me about 1% of my revenue from when they told me to stop.
Just wait (Score:3)
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The HELL it will, regardless of what YOU may be willing to accept.
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The advice of their lawyers will be it's better to spend $200,000,000 on lawyer fees than submit to a $100,000,000 fine.
I don't think fines are tax deductible. Lawyers fees are though.
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Then unless you have a >50% tax on profits, paying the $100M fine is still better for the bottom line of the company.
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Not better for the lawyers.
If you win (or just come to confidential settlement), you don't have to concede you did anything wrong.
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To be overturned in an appeal.
Not unless the campaign donations are brought up to current standing....
Return to unlimited (Score:5, Interesting)
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Does anyone know if there will be a path back to the unlimited plans we were pushed out of?
That will never ever happen, but you could probably take AT&T to small claims court every year for the losses you have experienced due to the lack of the unlimited plan :p
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I may assume they stopped offering these unlimited plans.
Here in Hong Kong mobile companies were also offering "unlimited", and in the beginning these plans were unlimited. Then iPhone came, and data use skyrocketed: fair use policies were used to throttle heavy users, later limits after which accounts were throttled came in place. The data amount was still "unlimited" as in no extra charges for more use but the speeds were lowered. Probably a similar argument was used by AT&T as they also didn't fully
This takes me back. (Score:3)
It feels like 2001 all over again when the ACCC s heavily slapping Telstra around in Australia for the same practices. Then subsequently for not providing usage data once the limits were openly defined... And then again once it was found out that they were limiting based on real-time stats but providing users day of stats.
USA you have a way to go yet.
I Predict... (Score:2, Insightful)
I predict next year, AT&T's rates will magically go up by $100,000,000 divided by the number of their customers.
AT&T now knows the cost of cheating; next to nothing. And they can now budget for it.
The winner here is AT&T.
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Even if AT&T didn't have to pay a $100M fine, couldn't they still have raised rates by $100M/number of customers regardless? They don't need to wait for a fine to do that. They should (and probably are) simply charging customers the most they feel they can get away with at any given time, but that has nothing to do with whether they received a fine. It's not as if customers are all of a sudden willing to tolerate higher rates because ATT was fined.
Absolutely true. In addition to this increase, they'll have an additional line item on their bill, with some nebulous "shenanigans fee" label, which will handle the FCC fines just nicely.
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I predict next year, AT&T's rates will magically go up by $100,000,000 divided by the number of their customers.
Not even close... AT&T is just going to slow down a bit on their equipment purchases (say a couple of cell towers won't get upgraded or something) but their operating costs are going DOWN per subscriber, even with such a fine. They won't pass this on in the form of rate hikes...
They may just jack up the price of a cell phone by a few bucks or something, but their monthly rates will stay competitive, meaning they will be dropping like everybody else's are. What AT&T cannot do is lose market share.
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Economics doesn't work like that. Prices are set by the market, as a function of what people are willing to pay and how much it takes to produce the product.
If costs go up, that creates a change in supply and raises prices, and both marginal profit and quantity supplied will drop.
If AT&T chooses not to charge that equilibrium price, that means they're taking a loss, in the economist's usage of the term (as opposed to an accounting profit, i.e. they might still turn a profit, but it's less than what it c
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Could you imagine? (Score:2)
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That's the regular rates in Canada.
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I hope for you that'd be in Canadian dollars not US dollars or you'd really be fleeced!
So, cost of doing business, not jail time? (Score:2)
Look, when you get to keep all the money you stole and pay a fine of 0.01 pct of the amount you stole, it's like a checking fee for being one day late.
Until we see real jail time for senior execs who signed off on these illegal actions, it's meaningless.
What really will happen. (Score:2)
Ooops.. Somebody forgot something.... (Score:2)
Somebody at AT&T forgot to make that recurring cash donation to the political party in power and *now* they will pay the price... Come on AT&T you know how this game is played, how the FCC does "business" here. Suck it up and write that check so we can get this overturned on appeal.
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Not meaningful (Score:2)
This is not the government fixing a problem for consumers but rather the government finding a revenue source. By levying huge fines the FCC can fund itself. Our state and local governments are using this same technique. They love those red light ticket cameras, parking meters that zero out when you leave the space (double billing), speed traps, etc. More government so we can have more government. Big of the bigger.
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As a customer who has personally been affected by this shady practice, I like that the Government is stepping in and regulating what is clearly false advertising and deceptive business practices on the part of AT&T.
AT&T took very intentional steps here to degrade what customers were promised, with the intent to switch them over to higher-priced service plans. It also was done in a way to prevent customers escaping via escape clauses when contract terms changes.
As a customer, what are my options to a
couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people (Score:2)
All the big carriers... excluding t-mobile from my own experience... are these disorganized corporate monsters that don't even know what they're doing half the time.
I don't think they're half as evil as they appear... its just this relentless incompetence. Most of it is in the management structure.
A good thing ATT should do is split in maybe a dozen different companies. And then NOT immediately fucking merge back together again. Yes it improves your stock value but you're well past your peter principle with
The Traffic Fine Issue (Score:3)
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You're comparing some front-line network admin who changed a setting on some networking gear as requested by their management, to prioritise some traffic in a way that probably still left everyone better off than they were just a few years ago, probably with no knowledge or reasonable expectation of having knowledge of any commercial deals or what the effect would be on any specific customers... to Nazis who executed Jews in death camps?
And with a bit of anti-India racism as well?
It's pretty early in the th
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How in-fucking-sane are you?
Almost as insane as someone who goes to work for AT&T even though they know that they are the devil. We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company. What the everliving fuck. What happened to personal responsibility? Working for AT&T is nowhere near as bad as exterminating jews (as one commenter complained) but it's still pretty fucking sleazy.
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Lots of people work for shitty management. So what? It's a case of blaming the victim.
People just want a goddam job.
Look at Chick fil A. The owner is homophobic. Let's you and me go beat the shit out of his employees over it.
As for the remark you mention, I find it to be offensive, irrelevant, and not mine.
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Look at Chick fil A. The owner is homophobic. Let's you and me go beat the shit out of his employees over it.
Well, no. But if someone has a choice of where to work, and they choose to work there, they're an asshole.
As for the remark you mention, I find it to be offensive, irrelevant, and not mine.
I was consolidating, and covering bases. But that's good to know.
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I agree with you on all points.
Consider the restrictions we're imposing on a person trying to make a living:
1.) The person has choices about where to work
2.) They choose to work there anyway (assumes they even know about the place)
3.) Boom. They are an asshole.
How many people dig through years and years of stories that are in the public domain to see if they have to become an asshole to be gainfully employed?
How many "techs" do you think are going to bail from AT&T, now that this story is out, because t
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How many people dig through years and years of stories that are in the public domain
People with a little bit of technical knowledge are often familiar with which ISPs, telcos etc. are bad, not least because there is always someone there to tell them. Meanwhile I know personally people who are willing to tell themselves whatever they have to tell themselves to justify their high-dollar gig at Halliburton.
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And, in your world, management = tech ...
Re: ATT Techs (Score:2)
ATT trivia time:
There exists multiple employee types at the company. They are:
Executive Level
Management
Non-management ( union )
Contractors
Overseas business units
" Techs " can be pretty much anyone from the bottom of that list up to roughly a Director level, ( 3rd line mgmt, think CCIE types ).
Fourth line and above are pretty much the executive levels and this is where tech skills vanish and MBA types begin.
Thus, it should be noted that some mgmt types actually are considered techs.
Source: Sadly, I work t
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yar, how many appeals will 100M buy you?
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0.3% compared to 2014 ebitda
Re:Works for "unlimited" but not for "infringe" (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with the FCC's ruling, "unlimited " data really isn't "unlimited" if there is a time and speed limit anywhere in the system. They haven't yet invented an unlimited speed data pipe for a cell phone and AT&T is fond of monthly billing....
But let's not get technical...
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Even with the FCC's ruling, "unlimited " data really isn't "unlimited" if there is a time and speed limit anywhere in the system.
You are confusing unlimited (without limit) with infinite (without end). If you don't apply an artificial limit to the pipe, then the pipe is unlimited. If the pipe can transfer more than you can possibly stuff into it, then the pipe is infinite (in bandwidth.)
Sure, unlimited can mean infinite in English sometimes... but not here
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AT&T is/was intentional bottlenecking the traffic of "unlimited" customers if you hit 3GB in a month. On average AT&T LTE speed, you can hit that monthly chokehold in just over 10 minutes.
10 minutes of full network usage a month, and they call it "unlimited".
While simultaneously they spam you to switch to their convenient 4GB/mo plan with 1GB billing increments beyond that to avoid any speed limits.
There is no possible way that a defined cap can be construed as "unlimited". Whereas "full usage up to