Friends, Please Tell T-Mobile’s CEO About EFF

That is just... stupid. Calling out a major corporation for deceptive practices is "stirring up trouble"? A non-profit organization is supposed to be "on the same side" as some company you arbitrarily annoint as the holy one? Someone who "knows who they are" seriously believes they are "being paid" to do what they always do, shine a light on troubling events in the digital world?

Are you a t-mobile employee?

A user-friendly "Binge On" implementation can be done. You don't need to force plaintext or throttle anything. You just watch traffic at the L3 level, and if it's one of the IP addresses of Spotify or Netflix or whoever, don't record that traffic in your data usage accounting system.

You want Netflix to go faster? Work with them to add a bunch of cache servers with the couple hundred most popular movies, and have your DNS servers point to those. If you want to only do this for 480i video, have Netflix add a small setting that only shows up when you're running on a phone on the T-Mobile network.

No need to artificially slow other video down. You get to make the same marketing claims, except they're true now. You still get to be the "free data for all my video" carrier. Netflix might get a few new users (because mobile is making it feasible for normal people to avoid having computers or land-line internet connections again). Everyone wins.

>John Legere firmly believes that he fights for the user (consumer)

That seems... unlikely.

Further saying "he's going to lash back and ask" implies that was the only and inevitable response, as opposed to say: just having the PR department draft a response carefully defining what exactly BingeOn does/doesn't while trying it's damnedest to pretend it's just issuing this release because T-Mobile felt like it and not at all because a consumer advocacy group called them a bunch of shitheels... you know how companies usually respond.

> John Legere firmly believes that he fights for the user

I wish you were being sarcastic. John is, at heart, a salesman - a mild con artist. He is putting on an act. all he cares about is making more money for tmobile - everything else is an act.

> But he's asking now because to him they are acting out of character

EFF is exactly acting in character. So is Legere - as someone whose job it is to manipulate people into seeing tmobiles aggressive business tactics in the most positive light possible.

Legere is attacking EFF in this way because he knows that most people are very responsive to this kind of emotionalism - he is hoping to discredit EFF in the eyes of his loyal tmobile-loving social-network keyboard warriors.

> they'd inform T-Mobile more quietly

tmobile KNOWS they are throttling data! Or limiting bandwidth. Everyone involved already knows this! Legere only squabbles over semantics, otherwise he is bragging about this throttling.

> Are they being paid to? If they fought for the consumers, why would they attack such a consumer friendly company such as T-Mobile?

That is exactly the kind of nonsense which Legere is hoping people will think.

"if EFF is on the same side, they'd inform T-Mobile more quietly that they're actually throttling data"

T-Mobile knows it's throttling data.

All the EFF did was tell everyone else the results of testing. John's basically saying "who the fuck are you for telling everyone".

Whether or not it's true that the data throttling is unintentional, by being publicly hostile to the EFF, he's losing customer goodwill that's one of the biggest things T-Mobile has going for them.

> Personally, I really do believe the throttling here is not intended behavior of Binge On. I honestly do.

Could you elaborate on this? I wasn't aware about Binge On before, but going just off this incident it appeared to me like deceptive behavior on T-Mobile's part. I feel like I don't have enough information to make a fair judgement though.