T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fuck Are You, EFF?'
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
(to be clear, I don't think the EFF catering to T-Mobile's competitors, just that it's a healthy skepticism to have of organizations like it)
Hopefully enough people care about this to influence the FCC before T-Mobile meets them on January 15th to discuss their Binge On program as per: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/t-mobiles-video-thro...
I was looking for EFF membership numbers as a point of comparison, but I couldn't find them. Does anyone know where to find them?
ILA is just one facet of what the NRA does; the rest is generally ignored by major media.
(ILA = Institute for Legislative Action, the lobbying arm)
BTW, I'm not saying that the rest of NRA isn't also financially transparent, I just haven't researched that in years.
[1]: http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun...
It seems to me that the NRA positions itself to the
government as a representative of all gun owners.
Blaming existing law and the NRA after a highly-reported shooting is common, even when the gun was obtained illegally and the shooter not legally eligible to own one. An analog would be blaming Planned Parenthood when a newborn is abandoned to die.
Respectfully, I think you should look carefully at the kinds gun regulations that are being proposed today. People are confused as to why the NRA would oppose background checks on all firearms transfers without understanding that all proposals put forth to date would create firearms registries, which have been abused in the past. If you came up to a solution to that (and didn't add a new tax on firearms transfers), you might actually get the NRA's support. Additionally, some state "universal background check" measures have done ridiculous things like make it illegal to lend a firearm to someone at a shooting range.
1) You apply for a background check; there will be a fee to cover costs.
2) Assuming you pass the background check, you are issued an ID
3) Any gun sale would require you to present the ID. This includes in-state private-party transfers. The seller keeps (but does not register centrally) a record of this (e.g. a photocopy)
Note an unexpired id from #2 is not required for possessing a firearm, merely for acquiring one, and having been issued an ID at some point in the past is not proof that you have any firearms (as you may have never purchased one at all, or you may have sold all the ones you purchased).
While not perfect, it is a better system than the current system, and lets you audit people suspected of selling firearms inappropriately. Individual firearms are not registered, nor is it possible for the government to generate a list of definite gun owners (though eventually it would be possible for the government to generate a list of definite non-gun owners once everyone who owned a gun before the law was in effect is dead).
• An ID card does not guarantee that the bearer has not subsequently been deemed mentally incompetent nor convicted of a crime that disqualifies them from firearms ownership.
• Your proposal would require anyone who has ever sold a gun to maintain records of the transfer indefinitely. In order to have teeth, you'd have to create a new crime for failure to do so. Even federally licensed firearms dealers don't have to maintain records indefinitely.
All this aside, there is the larger issue that the kinds of events that prompt such proposals (Sandy Hook, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Charleston) have perpetuators who either passed NCIC or would have if they went through a dealer. And while mass shootings are what get all the news coverage, they are hardly representative of the average shooting, where the guns tend to have been acquired illegally already.
If you don't agree that background checks are a good idea at all, then just say so.
This proposal is likely a lighter financial burden than either requiring everyone to get a background check for every transfer, or to require everyone go through a federally licensed dealer.
It wouldn't necessarily need to be indefinitely; how long one wants to require this is a policy choice. Long enough to catch repeat offenders is all one really needs; stopping a single person from just once committing any crime is pretty hard.
Here's an announcement: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/fcc-approves-net-neutral...
If what telekom is trying in germany is a any indication, the plan is to move all traffic to the BingeOn mode. After that, they degrade services that are not paying them and zero-rate + allow higher bitrates for services that pay them.
But "paying" is not cash if the talk in our startup scene is to be believed. Telekom is pulling out of startup incubating (after failing miserably) and are trying to use their position as an intermediary to get equity off of every new startup.
How? Imagine a new startup "meflixtube": growth is good, funding is secured, everything looks great. Telekom notices and says "would be a shame if something degrading would happen to your service, ey? give us a few percent of equity and you'll get zero-rated, undegraded access to our customers". Now instead of getting a few $$$, they are in line to get a few 100 million $$$ when a few of the new startups take off. They can even make sure that the startups they have "convinced" don't get any competition by refusing the same deal to competitors.
tl;dr: Telekom is not after customer money, their customer base is the market they "offer" to companies and zero-rated, undegraded data is their gate.
I find "proprietary technology" claims amusing because to me that is such an obviously bad thing, and bragging about it is like General Mills bragging that every box of Wheaties is contaminated with mercury and PCBs.
Or is the worry that only indefinitely free offerings can set the stage for trouble later? To me both viewpoints set the stage for trouble, except the indefinite free offering is a darker shade of gray.
For example, if T-Mobile started charging $10/month to access Spotify on their network, that's an obvious net neutrality problem. What I'm saying is that if T-Mobile lets you access Spotify for free on their network, that is also a net neutrality problem, although many people see it as just a bonus.
Stuff where an entire plan is free is fine. It's when different traffic is treated differently that net neutrality comes in.
A counter example that I bet T-Mobile is waiting to deploy is parental control. As strange as it sounds, there are actually families that pay to have their wireless carrier restrict adult content while on-net.
EDIT: "As strange as it sounds" refers to the fact that most parental control solutions are network-based, when in fact a proper parental control solution should be client-based because as soon as your child goes to WiFi at MacDonalds/Starbucks they probably have access to all the adult content they want to see by bypassing the wireless carrier parental control network controls.
a) eat up more data as the client's parental control component needs to continually update its URL database;
b) require more CPU and RAM (i.e. more expensive phone) if you want a better "content inspection" engine (since URLs are notoriously easy to bypass);
c) you are willfully acting as a MITM and creating a backdoor by forcing all content to be decrypted in some way for the solution to work effectively and only controlled by you (the parent), which may (or may not) compromise your stance on the issue of e2e encryption, privacy and security;
d) (your point above and following from c) having to personally safeguard and secure your child's device;
e) on Android, is it even possible to not root the device? Where's there's a will, there's a way: most kids with smartphones coupled with an incentive to bypass controls (Minecraft was a good example given above) could easily root their device, or eventually social engineer their parents into choosing future devices that are rootable.
My parents stopped filtering my internet at about 8 - I'd been online since 4- and while I'm certainly more scarred and savvy about a variety of strange subcultures than I would otherwise be, I am glad of it. Even before then, the filters had not been 100%; I know by anecdote that I had seen some seriously deranged pornography before the filters completely dropped, and I really just wasn't interested.
And to anyone that doesn't think kids know how to change the wifi settings:
My son is 6. He trawls for open wifi like crazy if I don't start my hotspot. And other kids do to, at an alarming rate: We were flying to see his grandma before christmas and at the gate at London Gatwick, I turned on my hotspot. He was one the iPad that automatically connected. Only I had turned the password off at some point for some reason. Within a couple of minutes, half a dozen kids had joined his Minecraft world by finding my hotspot, and then starting Minecraft and realising there was an accessible local server ....
(alarming, because they'd be an oh-so-tempting target for all kinds of stuff...)
Incidentally, when I went looking for the setting today (it's in your account profile under Phone Controls), I discovered I now have a Binge On setting, which is (of course) on by default. However, I haven't checked to see if streaming video works (even though I have no data plan).
1) they are allowing customers to opt-out (maybe they will concede this could be improved, but it doesn't change their fundamental desire to circumvent net neutrality); 2) content discrimination has positive benefits for consumers (i.e. allows higher consumption of content)
T-Mobile may be willing to bet that the FCC and consumer groups will be hard-pressed to claim that sending HDTV vs. EDTV falls under a discriminatory context given the consumer benefits and (seeming) fulfillment of video service.
"degrade services that are not paying them" and "allow higher bitrates for services that pay them" would even more blatantly violate FCC net neutrality in the US.
T-Mobile here is circumventing this by only zero-rating with an opt-out mechanism. If they tried to pull a stunt like Deutsche Telekom in Germany, they'd be fined in no time by the FCC in a clear and shut case. They are doing something far more subtle here in the US.
EDIT: For clarity, Deutsche Telekom is a majority shareholder of T-Mobile USA.
So other carriers sure could implement the same thing, but nobody is crazy enough to do that until they figure out how T-Mobile subscribers and the FCC respond.
The reality is that wireless bandwidth is constrained and sustained transfers at high rates degrade the overall experience of everyone using a particular cellular tower. T-Mobile, being particularly bandwidth constrained, is attempting to mitigate this issue. They're doing it by offering a service where if you allow your bandwidth for certain content types to be be throttled, then the bandwidth you use for certain qualifying services won't count against your data cap. They're offering a carrot, not threatening with a stick.
Yes it's opt-out, but that was probably done intentionally because most folks won't notice the degradation or won't care, AND, more importantly, most people wouldn't bother to enable it if it were opt-in. If T-Mobile made it opt-in then their adoption rate would be lower so by making opt-out they're getting the greatest benefit.
I just looked at my account and the toggle to turn Binge On off is easily accessible in my user profile. It's not a buried feature anywhere. The only possible gripe I could see is that the setting is granular and per-line making it marginally harder to disable, but that's also a benefit. I have multiple lines on my account but only 1 has unlimited data, so the ability to disable it for just that one line is nice and allows me to have my cake and eat it too.
While content manipulation would give pause for concern, as it does with Comcast's data cap notifications, that isn't what T-Mobile is doing. They're not altering the traffic, they're altering the transport rate which is very different. By lowering the bandwidth of certain content types, they're triggering the adaptive technologies employed by services to behave differently.
One of the EFF's gripes was that the pipe constriction was indiscriminate and thus services that didn't employ adaptive technologies experienced buffering and stuttering issues. That's probably the only legitimate point they made.
T-Mobile's network is one of the weakest, if not the weakest, of the big 4 telcos. It's theirs or Sprint's. I went with them anyway because they appeared to be "less evil" than Verizon or ATT. But after all is said and done, if I'm a slave to a hostile corporate overload anyway, I may as well get good coverage.
After the last few weeks of T-Mobile and their CEO's shenanigans, I'll just go with Verizon from now on.
“T-Mobile utilizes streaming video optimization technology throughout its network to help customers stretch their high-speed data while streaming video.”
EFF:
T-Mobile seems to be arguing that downgrading video quality is not actually throttling, but we disagree. "Throttling" means that when a video stream hits T-Mobile's network, its bandwidth is capped. If the video provider's server has the capability to adapt the quality of the video, then the server can do that—but it is the video provider that is using "adaptive video technology," not T-Mobile. In other words, T-Mobile just constrains the bandwidth, and it's up to video providers to make sure their videos stream smoothly.
This isn't semantics—it's apples and oranges.
If T-Mobile wanted to give its customers more choice, it would have made Binge On opt-in, not opt-out. And if Binge On was really about helping customers stretch their data, then T-Mobile wouldn’t have automatically enabled Binge On for customers with unlimited data. They would also zero-rate all videos they throttle, not just the videos of providers who have enrolled.
- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/binge-lite-ask-truth-a...
The EFF is right that it's throttling and T-Mobile is right for not wanting to call it throttling for very obvious reasons. And It is also "adaptive video technology", the EFF seems to think that term has any predefined meaning but it doesn't, T-Mobile literally made it up.
I disagree with the EFF's assertions about opt-in vs opt-out, they seems to not want to accept reality and why T-Mobile is doing this. T-Mobile, and anyone who isn't AT&T or Verizon, is very bandwidth constrained because of the way spectrum is auctioned off. They are trying to maintain acceptable service for their customers but can't if everyone is streaming 1080p video from the internet. While throttling is usually a poor decision for bandwidth management, persistent streaming is an exception where it helps. By turning this on by default, they're freeing up a lot of congestion. Most people won't know or care and those that do have a way to turn the service off.
That being said, T-Mobile isn't just degrading service, they're offering you incentives for accepting the degraded service. If you don't want the offering, you can turn it off easily.
I say this as a customer :/
The sales department. Am I right, engineers?
That's just comedy.
I wonder if he's on an internal hunt to find out who confirmed to the EFF that videos were being "throttled".
In most markets, TM can't compete head-to-head with the dominant LTE provider in that market. If other MNOs follow T-Mobile's lead (certainly not a given, but a possibility), then this moves the playing field to WiFi. And T-Mobile may prefer to play there.
For example, they were the first as far as I can tell to launch extensive WiFi calling and WiFi SMS, even extending to some American airlines (at least for WiFi SMS - calling is possible but socially unaccepted on planes).
Wireless carriers as a general rule are all looking at WiFi offload capabilities especially as 802.11ad and up provide higher transmission rates (peak and average theoreticals).
There is a race to perfect and bring to market seamless WiFi-base station handoffs (both ways) in real-world conditions. I suspect that will require a combination of channel (i.e. mobile devices) + wireless network upgrades, so in the meantime carriers need to bridge the gap. This is arguably a pretty good strategy assuming T-Mobile is expecting WiFi to handle even more of their traffic overtime.
Of course every carrier wants you using wifi instead of their network. Its not their expense, but you would still be paying them for it. But people are not subscribing to often ludicrous mobile plan bills to be told to not use it.
We absolutely have the technology to provide a huge swathe of people broadband (as per the new FCC relabel) Internet access through long-range transmission based tech like GSM CDMA or WIMAX. That makes it insane to propose laying physical wire in the dirt or making an interconnected mesh of low power wifi routers as a substitute. The only real barrier is the draconian privatization of photons that makes up spectrum regulation. If we had a 95% open spectrum with some restricted for government and emergency communications you could easily have broad spectrum towers that could adapt to congestion and pair them with radios that will adapt frequency to optimize for range vs data rate vs congestion.
The limitations are entirely artificial and that should be pissing people off.
I'm still on the fence about de-privatizing spectrum for a variety of reasons. But the biggest elephant in the room whenever discussing spectrum de-privatization is that the FCC earned US$45 billion from wireless carriers last year, and US$19 billion in 2008's auction (http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-rakes-in-45-billion-from-wirele...). In the grand scheme of the entire US federal budget, I think that's just a drop in the bucket. But it's still money that the federal government looks forward to.
So on the one hand, the FCC wants to play fair for consumers and tax-payers. On the other hand, the FCC can't really restructure an existing industry without biting the hand that literally feeds their existence to the tune of US$2-3 billion per year if you imagine their auction revenue as ratable over the years an auction doesn't take place.
Obviously we can look at the FCC and know it will not actually break up the spectrum monopolies, because its a conflict of interest. That doesn't change that privitization of radio waves is hostile to everyone but those who can exploit their ownership for profit.
If you exclude MVNOs
>because they're usually entirely dependent on the big four networks (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) for voice and a variety of data platforms.
Yes, that's pretty much the definition of an MVNO.
Google's convergence (i.e. bundling Fi+Fiber) in this space would be exciting if they could get their MVNO pricing competitive but I guess they'd have to buy T-Mobile or Sprint to make that happen because they're not going to sell minutes or data at a loss.
It's even cheaper if you don't opt out of BingeOn and can tolerate DVD (480p24) quality video streaming on your wireless device.
If there isn't ample competition or near perfect legislation, it doesn't matter what you pay, the service will eventually be held by a monopoly that can do almost whatever they damn well please.
You don't fight monopolies by paying more money, because as long as that's your only focus, the bar to entering the market will continue to rise until eventually you can't afford the `good guy`.
Right now, one network is pulling this throttling bullshit. If you don't like it, there are other choices. If you say "I wish I could switch but T-Mobile is cheaper" then what you're actually saying is that you don't care about the issue enough to pay for it, and that means the providers have no reason to care about it.
They're all doing something major that violates Net Neutrality.
Sprint's compresses images and throttles video https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e... They just don't advertise compression/throttling as a "feature", so it doesn't get the publicity. Sprint also does zero-rating for music.
AT&T has "Sponsored Data" and throttles 'unlimited' plans, and Verizon has their ad-tracking-injection mess.
Whoever I pay is going to get money for "pulling bullshit". I love the idea of voting with your dollar, but all of the major cell networks are anti-Net-Neutrality in multiple ways, so the whole thing is almost a false choice.
The comment I replied to mentions Project Fi, do they avoid all this?
Aside: not that this really makes it better, but AT&T's list of Sponsored Data providers is full of hilariously obscure companies:
It's one of the examples given during the FCC's bright-line guidance ( https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-332260A1.p...):
However, the network practice must be primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management and not business purpose. For example, a provider can’t cite reasonable network management to justify reneging on its promise to supply a customer with “unlimited” data.
But if the carrier chooses to throttle an "unlimited" data plan and thus degrades the delivery speed outside of "network management" contexts (such as congested network conditions) then they are now subject to additional punitive fines arising from net neutrality regulations that they are now subject to, on top of any (successful) fines related to misrepresentative advertising.
This falls under the category of willfully "impairing, or degrading" an existing service motivated by business interests related to the specific subscriber, instead of driven by purely technical network management justifications which would apply to a wider geographic area (i.e. not subscriber-specific), and this is one of the bright-line examples given by the FCC when they issued their press release.
As a side note, I believe the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection handles deceptive advertising enforcement, while the FCC handles net neutrality enforcement.
So, if you currently use 5-10 GB/mo on one carrier, the theory is that you'll use less - possibly significantly less - on Google Fi.
I don't think there is any "partnership", the "Wifi Assistant" feature just joins open wifi networks. It does do two neat things: first, it establishes a VPN tunnel through a Google controlled endpoint. Second, they seem to have a database tracking the quality of wifi networks. It won't join networks that are known to be slow, and if a network gets too slow it will automatically disconnect.
In practice though, almost every open wifi network is slow. Much slower than LTE, and certainly not something you could reasonably make a voice call over.
Overall I'm relatively happy with Fi. The service is a little better than T-Mobile (still not as good as AT&T) and the management interface is dead simple. Its what a software startup would build if they went into the cellular carrier business. And for my level of usage (3-4GB/month) the price is similar to T-Mobile.
But don't expect it to save you bandwidth.
(I migrated from Verizon to Project Fi, and live close to Canada, so, consider that I am used to turning my phone off when out of the country or near the border, because of Verizon's very unreasonable rates for international calling and text.)
I don't think you can order a Project Fi account as a non-domestic resident, though.
See Fi's rate card here: https://fi.google.com/about/rates/
So, if you currently use 5-10 GB/mo on one carrier, the theory is that you'll use less - possibly significantly less - on Google Fi.
That's SIGNIFICANTLY different from what you can see reported about how you manually configure the WiFi you have used today.
Also, there is the whole security issue of connecting to public APs automatically.
One add on to my own comment is that I forgot is that there is an allegation that Tmo is applying "video optimization" to content other than bingeon, which if true is a clear violation. It also is possible they are just incompetent too because that type of system they are using has to be programmed based on the 5-tuple source or destinations (and some other parameters) which it would not surprise me if they screwed that up).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10861391
(still ranked ~80)
He is backpedaling and now saying that "innovation" can be controversial.
The EFF does represent the concerns that most ordinary internet users should have but I don't know that I would say most of the do have those concerns.
In the US, the fact that most regulation is at the Federal level, implies that such a move will be relatively unconstrained by local governments and less burdened by franchise fees and right of way agreements and negotiations with power companies for stringing wires on poles. I suspect that regulations requiring big carriers to provide access on their networks and access to their exchanges may be another advantage, but I'm not a telecom lawyer.
It's probably a necessary move as video increasingly dominates bandwidth consumption. And my experience is that competition in the cable market tends to lead to better service.
I'm not really sure this is a bigger affront to net neutrality than some CDN delivering stale content or Google and Bing customizing my search results. It's just that we've come to accept those things and tend to heap hate on cable company business practices.
Nearly by definition, "cable company business practices" means shared bandwidth circuits, the business practices in question being network QoS attempts to make it profitable to offer shared network services at low cost.
I'd love to see a mathematical analysis of how much FIOS would cost if everyone got a 100% dedicated circuit at anything close to the advertised specs.
The hubbub about T-Mobile's policy is a misguided rant which idealistically supposes that all bandwidth should be sold in some idealized "dedicated" way with no QoS imposed. It certainly could be sold that way, but at a much higher price.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046877/who-the-is-this-guy-john-...
Be offensive, get millions of customers.
We think of bandwidth in terms of maximum throughput, which makes sense for a dedicated circuit, since often the customer of a dedicated circuit plans to keep it nearly saturated (consider an office phone system, for example).
We also care about latency and packet loss, but these are generally application specific concerns. Internet browsing works pretty well with high latency, but VOIP does not.
Generally, it's always possible to overbuild the circuit and exceed the minimum performance requirements. A small office could install a second T1 to handle the extremely rare case of all phones and all fax machines being in use at once, but it may prefer to save the money and use a single T1. The second T1 could be viewed along the lines of an insurance policy against a usage spike, and the decision not to buy it could be considered "living dangerously" or voluntarily exposing the company to that risk in exchange for money saved.
T-Mobile is not selling a dedicated bandwidth circuit to its customers, in spite of what the EFF wants us to feel indignant about. Yes, we all know the slippery slope the EFF is concerned about, but what T-Mobile is doing is quite reasonable.
Imagine that you are the only person using a cable modem in the whole neighborhood. There is ample bandwidth available to you. But if all the neighbors are also using it, there is throttling and prioritization going on so that the finite bandwidth can be shared optimally.
What does optimally mean? That is very much in the eye of the beholder. Maybe you play network games and would prefer that the network be optimized for low latency and UDP. Maybe your neighbor runs a BitTorrent node. Maybe someone down the street downloads raw SETI data for some kind of analysis. Each person has a different optimal QoS that he/she wishes the service provider would impose on everyone else.
T-Mobile has strong incentives to keep its customers happy. By analyzing the bandwidth usage, it has found a way to offer bandwidth at a lower cost by imposing a specific kind of QoS filter on the data.
This is precisely the purpose of QoS, being able to "stretch" bandwidth to accommodate more traffic by placing limits and prioritization on the traffic, with the goal of meeting all of the application specific requirements that the circuit would ideally meet.
So, quite reasonably, T-Mobile has found a way to constrain some of the most egregious bandwidth hogging behavior its customers do, and has engineered a way to offer the constrained service at an improved price and packaged in a way so customers perceive greater value from the service.
Yes, there might be someone trying to download SETI data over the T-Mobile LTE connection, or trying to compete in networked gaming, or all sorts of edge cases, but like Amazon's choice of which products it offers as Prime, T-Mobile has chosen a broadly appealing QoS filter which will result in most customers perceiving better value.
Additionally, it allows T-Mobile to leverage content providers in infrastructure planning risk, which helps reduce the amount of bandwidth speculation going on, and overall makes the circuit perform more like a dedicated circuit. This point is subtle but true.
So while the T-Mobile CEO seems a bit over the top, the EFF has (I think) gone over the line in an ill-conceived attack on one of the more progressive service providers. I personally donate to the EFF and proudly display the laptop sticker, but I also understand QoS and the complexity of shared infrastructure planning.
Personally my only concern is that zero rating only applies to video providers that sign up with them. If they want to be good corporate citizens, I think they should zero rate all the streams they detect as video, so there's a 1:1 mapping between zero rated and throttled.
I live in New York, where many many people's only connection to the Internet is on their phone. They have no home wifi. With this plan, t-mobile just became way more cost effective for those people if they want to watch tons of video.
Is it the first step down a slippery slope? I don't know. But this first step is awfully appealing from my point of view as a cheapskate consumer.
(My views here do not in any way represent the opinions of my employer.)
Founded July 6, 1990; 25 years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation)
What a curious definition of forever. I'm not always sure when the EFF is more interested in protecting digital rights or self-promotion. Some statements sure feel like the later.