What could one provide an infinite amount of? Shouldn't that empty set inform the reasonable interpretation of "unlimited" in this context?
No. It's not on the customer to decide what a reasonable interpretation of the company's offering is. It's up to the business to inform the customer clearly.
Clarity is in the eye of the beholder. This is why we have reasonableness standards: it's impractical to specify ex ante every term of a trade to infinite precision. Most people understand the intent of the term "unlimited" here, and given the fraction of accounts affected, this seems fine. (Also, until this announcement, it was unlimited. They're just discontinuing that. Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited forever.)
Like if I bought "unlimited" streaming vs. "Streaming limited to one screen at a time for one user" I'd be much happier about finding out that I can't watch one show in the bedroom and a different one in the living room than I would with my "unlimited" service.
And that's why "legalese" is a thing. Every possible interpretation needs to be handled to prevent loopholes.
That's a real defense and has precedent.
I don't think that I'd parse "unlimited" and "infinite" in the same way.
Some things are naturally limited by rate delivery, and advertising "unlimited" seems fine. e.g. I don't see a problem with advertising a phone plan as having "unlimited" minutes, rather than specifying a limit of 10,080 minutes per week. The number of minutes are not infinite, but neither are they limited by the carrier.
If you buy thousands of these phones, hook them up to a modem, and use them to send and receive information over the carrier's airwaves 24/7, you will overwhelm your tower.
Yea it's true that if someone tried to truly exercise the latter, for example by allocating several trillions of bot accounts, then for sure you're going to get a call from the provider politely instructing you to desist. And I think that would be reasonable of them, and the marketing should not be considered deceptive.
The question is, does the same logic apply to TBs of storage? Is there anything that distinguishes these two use cases?
I guess the marketing offer of 'unlimited' could perhaps be read as 'all that 99.9% of customers ever need, but if you're one of the remaining 0.1%, you have to pay extra'.
That is to say, perhaps 'unlimited' could be read as a class of user that encompasses the vast majority of cases, as opposed to a literal resource quota. Is this reasonable or deceptive?
Depends on the facts and circumstances. When cellular providers throttled unlimited plans, I felt like it was deceptive. In this case, I do not. I am curious if those cut off genuinely feel they were deceived.