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Comment by whizzkid | Hacker News Reader

There is only one justified reason for phone companies to check if you are using your phone as a router, and that is when they provide unlimited data to your contract. Unlimited data is provided given that you are going to use it on your personal devices and not to act as an ISP to everyone around you. Other than that you generally pay for X GB of data and it is none of their business how you spend it.

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I would argue from a "well regulated market" perspective that is not justified either. A byte's a byte.

A byte for your use is not the same as a byte for someone else's use. Setting up a hot spot for other people could be viewed as reselling the service (even if you don't charge for it).

It's still creating restrictions that go against the "natural" behavior of the medium. That's why they need sophisticated tech solutions to enforce it - it's not natural to label bytes, it's not natural to even talk about using the connection yourself vs. reselling the service.

Copyright laws are restrictions that go against the "natural" behavior of any digital medium. Yet we still imple,ent and enforce them. That's what restrictions are, a way to turn ugly reality into a situation that's more felicitous for everyone.

Yup. That's why copyright laws ended up being a total dumpster fire. They're a desperate attempt at making digital data behave as if it were Gutenberg-era books. Not only they fight uphill against the medium, but by refusing to be grounded in reality, they opened themselves to abuse - and thus became captured by the rent-seekers from various industries.

If you aren't profiting, you aren't reselling.

If they're going to offer "unlimited data", then they should give exactly that. If you want to share it with the whole neighborhood, that's your business. If that's a technical problem for them, then they shouldn't be offering "unlimited data" in the first place.

But this is cartel behavior. Apple and Google are acting against their customer's interest to appease a 3rd party. The DoJ should get on this ASAP. Let's hope enough people get on board with EW's plans to break these guys up and regulate them.

I would not disagree :) and i think they came up with unlimited data plans just to label bytes in the future. And they are already doing that. You can already buy a plan with 10gb Facebook + 10gb whatever you want. Makes me sad.

A byte you will certainly use is much more expensive than a byte you are unlikely to use. If we mandated a single price it would get more expensive for non-tetherers.

If someone advertises "unlimited data" I expect unlimited data. The way they usually avoid abuse is by capping high-speed (3G or more) transfer to only some amount (e.g. 10GB/month), after that you get a "slow" connection... but even that should be clearly stated in the advertisement.

Here in the UK Ofcom (governing body over communications) are pretty strict with what you can adversise. For home broadband, providers have to give realisic numbers to prospective customers - not just an "up-to". For mobile, they have to be transparent in what they provide. So unlimited data, is just that, unlimited. End of last year there was an investigation opened against two providers due to throttling and limiting tethering data (domestically, still have roaming restricitions) when under an unlimited plan. They both agreed to remove the limits as they would both likely have to change their advertised plans if they didnt.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/bulletins/compet...

I used to do consulting for an international telecom....

One telco customer did not have tethering limitations in their customer contract agreements, so this one end users customer bought a number of devices, and then would resell internet service in local rural areas using his devices as backhaul. This one customer and his dozens of "ISP" devices were doing gigabytes and gigabytes of data per month, using approximately 80% of this whole carrier's data capacity.

That's not a tethering problem though, all ISPs have a no resale clause to prevent this. Unlimited (within the ToS) should be unlimited.

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