AT&T Lies About California Net Neutrality Law, Claiming It Bans 'Free Data' (arstechnica.com) 91
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T lied about California's net neutrality law yesterday when it claimed the law requires AT&T to stop providing "free data" to mobile customers. In reality, the California law allows AT&T to continue zero-rating HBO Max, its own video service, as long as it exempts all competing video services from data caps without charging the other video providers. But instead of zero-rating all video without collecting payments from its competitors in the online-video business, AT&T decided it would rather not exempt anything at all.
"Unfortunately, under the California law we are now prohibited from providing certain data features to consumers free of charge," AT&T claimed in its announcement that it is ending the "zero-rating" program that exempts some content from data caps. "Given that the Internet does not recognize state borders, the new law not only ends our ability to offer California customers such free data services but also similarly impacts our customers in states beyond California," the AT&T announcement also said. Going forward, AT&T will no longer exempt the AT&T-owned HBO Max from its mobile data caps and will stop the "sponsored data" program in which it charges other companies for similar exemptions from AT&T's data caps. But this is a business decision, not purely a legal one: as we already stated, AT&T could exempt all video streaming services including HBO Max from its mobile data caps without violating the California law as long as AT&T stops charging rival video companies for the same data-cap exemptions.
"Unfortunately, under the California law we are now prohibited from providing certain data features to consumers free of charge," AT&T claimed in its announcement that it is ending the "zero-rating" program that exempts some content from data caps. "Given that the Internet does not recognize state borders, the new law not only ends our ability to offer California customers such free data services but also similarly impacts our customers in states beyond California," the AT&T announcement also said. Going forward, AT&T will no longer exempt the AT&T-owned HBO Max from its mobile data caps and will stop the "sponsored data" program in which it charges other companies for similar exemptions from AT&T's data caps. But this is a business decision, not purely a legal one: as we already stated, AT&T could exempt all video streaming services including HBO Max from its mobile data caps without violating the California law as long as AT&T stops charging rival video companies for the same data-cap exemptions.
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How do you figure? This isn't kindergarten, you don't have to bring enough for everyone to share.
Every other market I can think of allows this. Car dealers give you a discount for using their financing. Insurance agents will give you a deal if you bundle car and house. Telco operators used to give free texting to others on the same carrier (this seems like a pretty direct comparison), I get unlimited miles on car rentals because I am a member of USAA.
But for some reason, a service that wants to discount/no
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As to the argument you make, I have a couple counter poin
Re: yea? (Score:1, Insightful)
This was an easily foreseeable outcome - I know, because I foresaw it years ago, and I wasn't alone.
Net Neutrality zealots argued that 'technically' Net Neutrality wouldn't prevent 'zero-rating' of carriers service, but while 'technically' correct, it is, for all practical purposes, all but impossible to offer it now.
Yes, 'technically' AT&T could simply provide free data to every competitor's streaming service at its own expense, but why would they? It will raise everyone's base AT&T bill (someone's
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That all said, AT&T's data caps are mostly an artificial constriction and only there to force users to pay more money. They have othe
Re: yea? (Score:1)
AT&T charged other streaming services a fee to "zero rate" their streaming data, so the consumer had zero rated streaming services, it was Netflix that covered the cost of the streaming data their customers used on AT&T network, giving them parity with HBO Max.
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They're all markets with competition. Personally, I have exactly one realistic choice for ISP, which gives them a lot of potential power. It's like if some company owned the only road and played favorites.
Personally, I wish it was more like the roads, publicly owned, allowing anyone to use them, resulting in lots of competition.
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I'm thinking of my Province, BC, (my town might work as well but it is more questionable) and what I meant was the wires/fibre, not the ISP's. As it is, there is minimal competition, with plans by industry to be less, leading to very high profits by the telecom's and some of the highest prices in the world.
There's lots of positive stories coming out of the States with municipal broadband and public water here is generally very good, whereas experiments back east with privatizing water don't sound as good, h
Re: yea? (Score:1)
So the same people responsible for the roads, bridges, etc. Will now be responsible for the "tubes" that make up the internet? Uhm, wow - no. Here in America politicians run for office on "fixing our crumbling infrastructure" every two years for the last 30+ years I've been aware of, and you know what? It never happens - funds for roads get diverted to bike paths, and the roads get worse, and the money to fix bridges? Well, it's better politically to build new bridges where they aren't needed, than to shutd
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The roads and bridges are pretty good here. It's true that often rather then fixing them, they're replaced, but considering the population growth, it usually makes sense to replace a narrow 4 lane bridge with a 8 lane bridge, especially with the cost of fixing the old bridge being almost as much and very disrupting to traffic.
With the exception of the last Provincial government, they've also done a good job with running the Hydro network (we call electricity hydro here). Unluckily the last government decide
Re: yea? (Score:3)
One difference is the other markets (besides telecos) are not declared and regulated as utilities, which goes back to the idea that we can't really have
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If someone says they are against a service offering free or reduced data services for particular services on a network, they are not for Network Neutrality - which is about keeping access to everywhere on the internet equal, not about shutting off reduced fee access to some areas.
Well:
Going forward, AT&T will no longer exempt the AT&T-owned HBO Max from its mobile data caps and will stop the "sponsored data" program in which it charges other companies for similar exemptions from AT&T's data caps.
So yes, this was about Net Neutrality, including according to your definition.
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Re: So in other words, not a lie (Score:1)
So all video streaming traffic is being treated equally, just as Net Neutrality advocates insisted it had to be.
Great, they got exactly what they wanted.
Re: So in other words, not a lie (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely a lie. Giving away free stuff is something they can still do, they just have to give away more free stuff than before if they want to do it, but that's a choice they can make. It isn't clear, but I wonder what would happen if they tried to zero-rate a service they didn't own and weren't being paid to, just as a promotion. That would probably also be fine.
So yeah, a complete lie. Just because it isn't profitable doesn't make it impossible.
Re: Not free if it comes with burdens (Score:5, Insightful)
Why else do you think the government sets huge taxes around things they are trying to discourage?
I don't think the point could hit you harder if it came wrapped around a brick aimed at your face.
Re: Not free if it comes with burdens (Score:1)
First up they will not be spending money, they will just not be making as much, if they give free stuff.
Secondly, if we look at it like a house, you have to look at it like what if Wal-Mart owns your house, and you are renting it.
If you go out the South door, which happens to lead directly to a local Wal-Mart, that door is free to exit.
But if you use the north door, which goes to I-mate, or the east door, which goes to quicky-mart, then you ha
Re: Not free if it comes with burdens (Score:1)
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And there IS a big difference in not earning as much, and actually spending stuff. It's much much much more difficult to actually hand out cash, than to give some "free" money away. Which is what monopolies often do, where they "give away for free!!!!" and cut the margins in one part of the business, in order to make more money in another part of the business. The classical example is obviously the old TANSTAFL - There aint no such thing
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Well, create two black boxes. In one, put in $10M then take out ('spend') $1M. In the other, put in $9M. Then have someone come in and tell you which box is which. Nobody will care, it doesn't make a difference.
If your potential earnings at the end of the year are $X, and you only earn $(X-Y) then it doesn't matter if you 'didn't earn' or 'spent' Y. Money is money. It's like one of the gambler's fallacies where if you win $100 you can blow that money because it's the house's money - only it's not, it's your
Re:Not free if it comes with burdens (Score:5, Insightful)
Not making revenue is NOT the same as losing money. Nobody is charging AT&T a million dollars. They are saying "You must treat your Internet service in a neutral way. If you give something of yours away without charging for the bandwidth, you can't charge bandwidth for the same thing when someone else does it."
Now, as far as I know, AT&T is leasing the public airwaves from we, the people. We have the right to set whatever stipulations we want on their use. Letting companies charge bandwidth to competitors while allowing them to not charge it for their own services leads to unfair competition.
It is also false advertising. You are not buying "AT&T telecommunications services to connect to AT&T owned properties" you are buying "Internet service." AT&T should not be allowed to change the rules and accounting depending on where the data originates. If you let them do that for their "free" services, they will find ways to do it for other things.
In short, "net neutrality" is all or nothing. Either your network is neutral as far as data origination, or it is not. And if it is not, then it isn't "The Internet" it is a walled garden.
Re: Not free if it comes with burdens (Score:2)
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AT&T is generally operating on licenses they purchased at auction from the FCC. These licenses do have operating conditions attached to them but as a general rule those license conditions don't change without considerable debate and warning. Companies have invested billions and employ tens of thousands in building their businesses on the licenses. You can't just wave your hands and yell "in the public trust". So...things move slowly.
CPUC may be overstepping their bounds as they don't regulate spectrum l
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No, they're leasing those frequencies from the federal government, not the State of California. They have an agreement with the federal government (representing "we the people") about how they can use those frequencies already and they weren't violating that agreement.
This is California deciding they can micro-manage their business and their customer's desired agreements (generally speaking, they want the zero rating, BTW), despite it not being something AT&T agreed to before.
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Because AT&T in no way shape or form takes advantage of any sort of right of way in the state of California?
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The post I was replying to stated "AT&T is leasing the public airwaves from we, the people. We have the right to set whatever stipulations we want on their use".
That has nothing to do with whatever separate agreement AT&T might have with governments in California. Presumably, their largest agreements with governments in California are for their telco fiber/copper business, not anything to do with leasing airwaves from the federal government.
But sure, California's government has the power to complete
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And yet, very few very businesses are clamoring to move out of Ca (yes a few are, many aren't).
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Requiring someone to spend money is essentially the same as preventing that activity in many cases. Why else do you think the government sets huge taxes around things they are trying to discourage?
You mean like Obamacare? I and millions of other co-workers were essentially driven into BK by this. Which is why I now support M4A. But of course, we, the mightiest of all, just can't afford it... Of course, there wasn't any problems handing trillions to Wall St. via the repo market last year though. Nosiree, no problem at all.
Re:Not free if it comes with burdens (Score:5, Funny)
That's an absurd strawman and you know it.
The lie is in the "we're not allowed". They ARE allowed. They don't WANT to. They CAN, but it comes with caveats. If you don't like driving the speed limit, you're still allowed to drive your car. You can't say, "I'm not ALLOWED to drive my car," just because you can't drive it the way that you want without getting in trouble.
If they had said, "because of rule changes, it is no longer profitable/viable for us to provide this service free of charge any longer," that would be a fair assessment, and the customers could be disappointed about that. As it stands, their wording is an absolute lie.
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Not when it comes with a giant anchor of extra money and bandwidth they would have to spend
Why? Are all those people currently watching HBO going to be watching HBO *and* some other channel simultaneously? Or where is the extra bandwidth going to come from?
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They could also split off media creation business with internet delivery basis. Aw, who am I kidding, unfair competition is here to stay!
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They could also split off media creation business with internet delivery basis. Aw, who am I kidding, unfair competition is here to stay!
They could also charge less for HBO and more for the bandwidth.
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AT&T isn't the one lying here. They're absolutely banned from just giving away their own services via free data.
Saying "Well, they could still do that if they also give away every else's" is besides the point. They've been legally banned from doing what they were doing before, to the benefit and with the agreement of their customers.
If I told you that you could only feed your kids if you agreed to also feed all the other kids in the neighborhood the same meals, it'd be just as fair to describe that as a
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Giving your own services priority over others is literally the exact opposite of 'neutral'. There's no way to do 'net neutrality' when you're actively not being neutral. Words mean things.
Re: So in other words, not a lie (Score:5, Informative)
No. They are PRIORITIZING THEIR OWN SERVICE.
THAT IS NOT NEUTRAL.
California's law bans them from giving priority to their service by zero-rating it. They are allowed to zero-rate their service if they zero-rate all other competing services, which makes the zero-rating neutral.
They're lying because they can ABSOLUTELY do that if they want to, they merely don't want to.
Re: So in other words, not a lie (Score:2)
You apparently don't know what the word monopoly means. AT&T doesn't even have a majority of the market share, let alone a monopoly.
Are you seriously trying to argue that no one can have a cell phone in California if they don't use AT&T for their service provider?
Re: So in other words, not a lie (Score:2)
A company competing by making their service better for customers is the opposite of "anti-competitive".
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So, you don't know what a monopoly is nor what competition is, and you think that a statement AT&T made which is literally true is false because someone in the media said so.
Is your goal to provide proof of the existence of a parallel opposite universe, from which you're communicating with us anonymously?
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"You can eat candy in class, but you have to bring enough for everyone."
Under that rule, if you ask the teacher and the student whether candy is allowed in class yes or no, you might get opposite answers. Is one of them lying?
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Solution, each day, a different student brings in enough for everybody.
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Solution, each day, a different student brings in enough for everybody.
Solution: Only bring candy no one else likes. That way enough for you is enough for everyone.
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Imagine a law that said a pizzeria can give away a free pizza toppings, but only if it pays for free pizza toppings on every pizza all competing pizzerias sell.
Yes the COULD give away free pizza toppings, but they won't.
More like if they offered free delivery of their pizzas but charged for delivering any competitors pizza and now have to charge for their own or not for their competitors. Solution charge for delivery of both but drop the price they charge for pizza.
Re: So in other words, not a lie (Score:1)
I wonder what would happen if they tried to zero-rate a service they didn't own and weren't being paid to, just as a promotion. That would probably also be fine.
Nope.
The well-being argument of the NN advocates is to treat all traffic the same - by taking payment to speed up traffic, they would be violating the equal treatment principle. Similarly, making only some streaming traffic free is bad, because it benefits some traffic at the expense of other traffic.
The issue isn't that AT&T owns HBO Max and zero rated the streaming data, it's that they weren't treating all streaming data identically. Either all streaming services are zero rated, or none are, and you c
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This is essentially what the law says, You can do what you want, if you accept these unsurvivable conditions at the time..
AT&T is right. Ap
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Yeah, it cracks me up how rabid they are about it. Net Neutrality doesn't matter much either way for me, but this article is a straight up lie.
It's like the old disingenuous nonsense that only allowing a marriage between a man and a woman is not at all discriminating because, whelp, even gay people are free to marry a person of the opposite sex if they so desire, hence not a problem!
It's stupid, dumb shit and nobody takes it seriously. AT&T isn't just going to open a free for all for all "video services
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It's like the old disingenuous nonsense that only allowing a marriage between a man and a woman is not at all discriminating because, whelp, even gay people are free to marry a person of the opposite sex if they so desire, hence not a problem!
I literally never heard anyone make that argument - the most common argument I heard about same-sex marriage was forcing churches to perform the services, force event halls, florists, caterers and bakers to supply their services to the same-sex ceremony, etc.
I've heard it many times. My counter was to point out that by allowing a man to marry a woman but not allowing a woman to marry a woman the law was discriminating against women by not allowing them to do as a man is allowed. The same is of course applicable to the reverse where it is the man being discriminated against by not being allowed to marry a man.
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It's still a lie. The law factually do not prohibit them from providing free services. They just have to do it fairly and they don't wanna. That's fine, they don't have to, but they should be honest about it.
I am prohibited by law from buying a Ferrari. No really, I am! Because to buy a Ferrari, I would have to rob a bank and that's a crime.
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They "just happened" to simplify it in a way that blames "bad 'ol gubermint" and makes them out to be the powerless victim.
As others pointed out, they COULD legally bill HBO the same rate they'd bill anyone else IF they wanted to continue.
Re:I thought Slashdot was for private business (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought Slashdot was for private business carrying whatever data they want and choosing to do the business they want everytime someone complained? can't you bUiLd uR oWn InTernet and have whatever net neutrality policy you want?
The network is not the platform. The platform is not the network. AT&T is a network operator. AT&T should be network neutral, and now they are, in one tiny respect. Platforms which USE the network can select their content, same as they have for the last century since wired networks came into existence.
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Re:I thought Slashdot was for private business (Score:5, Insightful)
Because ISPs are a cartel, and different rules apply. Often the user (I refuse to call them "consumers") has no choice or only an effective duopoly. And both members of the duopoly have similar rules about "fast lanes". There is no effective user choice. It's ECWHP (Evil Company With Horrible Policies) A, or ECWHP B.
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It's a perfect mirror of our political system. "You will eat a shit sandwich. Do you prefer cat shit, or dog shit?"
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They don't even let us choose horse shit or bull shit :(
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There has always been a dual standard between companies that have a monopoly or significant dominance in a market sector versus companies that do not. This is not new.
The problem is that AT&T essentially has two interrelated businesses, which makes this unfair. This is very similar to past anti-trust legal judgements, only AT&T isn't really a monopoly here. But AT&T is most definitely something that tries to lock you in. Changing your mobile phone company on a weekly basis is amazingly incon
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You guys always argue that the ultimate reason tech monopolies can censor is that private business should be able to do as they wish.
It's not "us guys" who are arguing that. It's a conservative majority US Supreme Court who has decided that, and only a new law from Congress or a new ruling from themselves can change it. The US Supreme Court and Congress both are big proponents of private property rights. To the point of insanity, because duopoly is indistinguishable from monopoly in practice and the FCC has been fooling itself for 25 years trying to pretend it is, while Congress sticks their fingers in their ears and goes "lalalalala"
Re: I thought Slashdot was for private business (Score:1)
This is California, and this is because of California's Net Neutrality laws - remember, Ajit Pai killed the internet when Trump took office - apparently only California is the only part of America with a functioning internet.
Updated Headline: AT&T Lies. (Score:3, Insightful)
Updated Summary:
See headline.
You've got your facts, AT&T has theirs (Score:2)
Why not the other way? (Score:3)
Re: Why not the other way? (Score:2)
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This has better optics for them
Yes and there are additional accounting costs that they are unwilling to pay.
Re: Why not the other way? (Score:1)
No, the issue is giving HBO Max customers an unfair advantage, as long as the customer gets an unfair benefit (zero rated [free] HBO Max streaming), it is verboten under California law.
Subsidizing competitors is not good business (Score:2)
But this is a business decision, not purely a legal one: as we already stated, AT&T could exempt all video streaming services including HBO Max from its mobile data caps without violating the California law as long as AT&T stops charging rival video companies for the same data-cap exemptions.
So all AT&T needed to do was give away unlimited data to all their competitors? Wow, when you say it like that I can't imagine why AT&T dropped the plan!
Subsiding HBO Max competitors is not the long-term goal for AT&T.
That's like saying my local tire shop can keep giving away the fourth store brand tire when you buy three, as long as the tire store offers the exact same deal on all other tire brands as well at the tire store's expense!
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Subsidizing competitors is not good business. But Disney would be doing exactly that if they paid AT&T not to count Disney movies against a customer's data cap (by paying money to HBO Max' owner AT&T).
AT&T is proving the service with the highest entry barriers, the fewest competitors, and the highest monthly fees (compared to Amazon, Disney, Netflix, etc.) Without Net Neutrality they were able to use their position as middle-man to extract money from more consumer-oriented and cheaper services.
Same as it ever was. (Score:2)
It's not like they were any better 45 years ago. [vimeo.com]
In Estonia... (Score:1)
There, I fixed it for them... (Score:2)
"Unfortunately, under the California law we are now prohibited from unfairly using out networking infrastructure business to benefit our media distribution business".
Hey AT&T, that's the whole point of network neutrality.