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I hate to reply to myself, but I wanted to say one other thing. When governments sell RF spectrum to companies, the expectation is that they become good stewards of the shared resource. The taxpayers are saying "you know, we think private industry can give us more value from our RF spectrum than the government", and this is their chance to prove that. What we didn't want was to enable a monopolist to nickel-and-dime the Internet to death.

I'm guessing the exact legal agreements didn't spell it out like this, but that's how I think of it. Only one company can use this finite resource at once, but just because they bought it doesn't mean there is no limit to what they can do with it.

> Right now, that is all technically possible, so they'd be defrauding their shareholders if they didn't try.

This sounds like a clumsy restatement of the urban legend that companies have an obligation to maximize shareholder value. There is in fact no such rule, for the obvious reason that nobody can accurately predict the future and calculate the optimal value.

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

In this case, a company like Apple could say that they are choosing to forgo short-term profits from selling out their users’ privacy because they feel that the long-term loyalty will be greater, and anyone arguing otherwise would still have to admit that this approach has been phenomenally profitable.

Does T-Mobile actually extort companies for transit? When they announced their video streaming throttling + zero-rating, I looked through their the publicly available documents. From what I recall, there wasn't any sort of payment process, and mostly there was two parts: identifying the traffic so T-Mobile knew to zero rate it, and either adaptive bandwidth usage (which seems pretty common for video streaming anyway) or identifying the traffic so the provider could serve lower bandwidth streams.

It's not in line with the net neutrality, but it's useful for the direct parties:

a) a video streaming customer wins because they can do video streaming without touching their data allotment.

b) the video streaming server wins because their customers are able to do more streaming

c) t-mobile wins because they've reduced bandwidth requirements

Competitive streaming services that are not included in the program don't win, but t-mobile made it fairly easy to join. Users who want to stream at 4k or whatever don't win, but they can turn off the bandwidth restrictions and use their data allotment if that's what they want to do.

At my last job, I was involved with a lot of zero-rating deals as the application provider; we never paid for it, and I don't recall ever being asked for payment. Some of the carriers even setup plans without our knowledge or consent or assistance; this didn't usually work great long term, because of misidentified traffic, but it indicates the demand was there without us pushing it.

> Right now, that is all technically possible, so they'd be defrauding their shareholders if they didn't try.

Can you expand on this? Are you saying that if a business opportunity exists and a company elects not to pursue it that constitutes defrauding shareholders? I would have thought it constituted nothing more than a disagreement over strategy.

It sounds like a sarcastic statement of the "profits not gained is profit lost" mindset and that shareholders would be upset, not literally a crime.

Yup, you're exactly right. I wrote it without thinking much (but wasn't fully serious), and didn't realize it would generate this much discussion. That's my bad for being a little careless with my rant. Thanks for clarifying it a little on my behalf.

> Meanwhile, Apple or their "third-party provider" could of course play this game, but historically tech companies have been super uninterested in doing this.

Apple notoriously "extorts" developers to be in the app store.

> Basically, what everyone wants is for companies like T-Mobile to be a dumb pipe. They invested in spectrum and a network, and they should just lease that network for cost + profit margin.

I don't think you've considered the alternatives if T-Mobile can no longer monetize traffic:

* Go back to subscribers pay per kb usage

* Eat the costs themselves

* Raise cost of mobile data plans

> Can you imagine what it would be like if other utilities did this kind of shit?

They side step this problem by charging per-use. During peak demand, prices go up. Each customer pays their share. Downside see Texas snowstorm.

I really don't see the horror that would be carriers charging for usage. I would rather that than pay for stupid things like "lines" or "devices."

> Go back to subscribers pay per kb usage

They charge $70/month for “unlimited” data which is only 50GB before throttling. I’m pretty sure they can profitably afford to run a network for that much without reselling user data.

They already charge per kb. Look at the small print -- once you hit a certain amount of usage, you are drastically rate-limited. The only difference is that some months, when you don't hit your limit, you pay more per byte.