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How landlords get kickbacks to lock tenants into big Internet providers
- travelton 10y agoSo happy to see an article about this issue... A few months ago, while apartment hunting, I was thinking to myself, why are people accepting this? Several apartments here in Austin, TX do this. In my search, I found the biggest offenders were Greystar and Camden properties. They lock you in to these silly "Entertainment" packages. Exclusively Time Warner, Grande, or AT&T depending on the property. If you're already in a contract with a provider, you'd have to break your contract just to move in? That's ridiculous. It's really unfortunate, as some of these properties are located in very desirable locations. I couldn't come to terms with being forced to use a certain provider. So I found a property in a less desirable location that offered full competition among utilities.
- heydonovan 10y agoI've experienced the same. As a consumer, what can we do? Complain on Twitter? Leave one star reviews?
- antif 10y agoI sent a referral in to the California Department of Justice/Antitrust Division when I ran into this at an Archstone (now Equity) property in Los Angeles. Didn't do me any good at the time, but hopefully they'll start investigating and prosecuting if people demand it. The company that was given exclusive rights to provide service was plainly advertising a kickback program on their website before, but it looks like they've cleaned that up since. Compare this `live` page: https://www.consolidatedsmart.com/commercial-services https://www.consolidatedsmart.com/commercial-services With this, from 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20041206091748/http://consolidatedsmart.com/property-owners.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041206091748/http://consolidat... """ As property owners, managers and business people, you have a captive audience of resident consumers... we consider it our mission to continue to offer more profitable ways to maximize ancillary income from your residents and customers. Consolidated is your proven resource to increase ancillary profit with: - Coin Laundry Systems - Smart Card Systems - Satellite Television - High Speed Internet - Domestic Appliances """ Turning customers into captives? Kickbacks? Sounds like the kind of work that would violate Sherman Antitrust or RICO Act provisions.
- vaadu 10y agoBS. Nobody is forced to live in these apartments. If you are looking to rent and this is important to you then rent someplace else.
- slantedview 10y agoIn cities with not enough housing (like, say, SF), then someone generally is forced to live there since alternative options may be slim to none.
- eropple 10y ago"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
- zaque1213 10y agoI agree with you. The apartment I recently moved into made it clear up front that hey had an exclusive cable and wireless provider. But the cost of the service is bundled into my rent. It's a great apartment in a great location and still cheaper than other apartments around so I decided I didn't care that much about choosing my own provider. It's not ideal and I thinks it's a shady practice, but I'm willing to live with it for a year or two.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoExactly - when looking for an apartment, unfortunately the ISP is pretty far down the list. Location, amenities, safety, layout, all end up being more important.
- zaque1213 10y agoYes indeed. Chose my apartment because it's a five minute drive from work and in Houston that is damn near impossible to find. I'd let the apartment owner kick me in the face every time I walked in my room if that's what it took not to return to my old commute.
- jdavis703 10y agoI lived in a building that had an exclusive deal with AT&T. Problem was they were out of "connections," and couldn't hook me up. I only had my cellphone hotspot for months, until I threatened to write a letter to the FCC and CPUC about their "monopolistic" practices in my building. They got a tech out the next day.
- r00fus 10y agoIf only more folks knew how the Telecoms/Utilities dreaded the public utilities commissions. If the FCC and PUCs could do marketing, that'd be awesome, but I'm sure some corporate crony politician (or even judge) would shut that down...
- cm3 10y agoDid you skip mailing the FCC/CPUC because you didn't want to piss off the landlord? I mean, you may have gotten on their naughty list either way, and it's important for the FCC to get more such complaints to take action.
- therein 10y agoI had the same experience in SF. AT&T tried to sell me 28Mbit for $75/month in SoMa and the building didn't allow me to bring Monkeybrains. They just said no and told me they had an exclusivity agreement with AT&T. Called Comcast, they told me they can't because the address looks like a business address despite being residential. I called the AT&T representative they got me in touch with. I told them about how what they are doing is illegal and they can't limit me to use this etc. They backed down. Gave me free cable, 50% off, waived the installation fee and came and installed it in a day. Their previous estimate for an installation was two to three weeks.
- gist 10y agoOk here we go again nobody is allowed to make any money and everything is unfair and capitalism is bad and so on. In practice if an apartment makes money by way of this "kickback" it also offsets the rent that they have to charge the tenants of that building. Similar to airlines, assuming that if one charge is reduced or eliminated it won't show up in another area (baggage fees) or in the case of a building reduced maintenance or services doesn't take into account how real businesses operate. There is nothing wrong with a business making money and in fact a business that is profitable is also good for it's customers. A business that loses money is not. The "peanut gallery" (people who write blog posts and comment on this but don't actually even own their own business) aren't in a good position to know all the ins and outs. That said, sure some businesses rip people off (if you want to call it that) but don't assume that is the default case. Edit: Perhaps this attorney (at Harvard no less) could write an article about the 'legal tax' on society as a result of lack of competition in the legal market. The cost to consumers for that (since it's passed along in product costs) is almost certainly way greater than whatever the 'vig' is for higher priced cable television or internet service.
- Gracana 10y agoThere's no incentive for that profit to be passed on as reduced rates for the tenants.
- ikeboy 10y agoCompetition.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoOnly a factor if there is a significant number of vacant properties that need to be filled with people, which is not the case in places like SF and NYC.
- ikeboy 10y agoThen why don't landlords raise the price until there are? Seems inefficient.
- SurrealSoul 10y agoMy apartment in the midwest provides their own internet service, which is provided from Comcast. It's an amazing $60/mo plan for 5mb/s with a datacap of 250gb a month. I can not get "real" unlimited Comcast for $50/mo due to the exclusivity agreement...
- mikeash 10y agoIn most of the US, you have a choice of one or two wired broadband ISPs anyway. I imagine most renters don't care about competition, since they know they wouldn't have much of a choice no matter where they go, and if they're in an area with two choices, they're likely to be equally crappy. ISP competition is important, but I see this as a symptom, not a cause. Fix the root problem, and people might start caring about ISP choice. Once renters care about ISP choice, big landlords will fall into line.
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoTypically there are four consumer level providers in US markets. One coax, one copper/fiber, one (or more) satellite, and most likely a regional operator that may be either copper/fiber or coax. Also some regions do have consumer-level WISPs, although those are more rare in urban areas. Webpass being a high profile exception. The problem is you can't get the standard Comcast or U-verse product in those buildings. The landlord signed a 10-year deal stating "10mb/s" per unit. Meanwhile your neighbor in a non-exclusive building gets 75mb/s easily for the same price or even less than you're paying under the exclusive agreement. Worse, a lot of these buildings sign deals with no-name local fiber providers (or resellers) who pull the same crap, so its not a "big business won't let us compete" issue as much as it is lack of choice for residents due to existing contracts by the property owner.
- mikeash 10y agoSatellite is terrible and doesn't really count. I've never heard of someone using satellite unless they literally have no wired ISPs available. IMO it belongs in the same category as cellular internet. According to this report, in 2013 only 28% of US households had three or more providers capable of giving 10Mbps service, and 24% only had one: http://esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/competition-among-us-broadband-service-providers.pdf http://esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/competition-among-us-... If you raise the bar to 25Mbps, then only 9% had three or more, and nearly half only had one choice. That's 2.5 years old, but I don't think it has changed all that much. Maybe they offer even worse services in these buildings, but I bet that in areas where they have a monopoly simply because of no competition, I bet it's pretty bad too. It certainly was for me when I lived in such an area.
- hNewsLover99 10y agoDoes anyone know if any large-scale landlord is also receiving user data as well as cash from its ISPs? EULAs are broad enough to let any ISP, website or app provider to do anything with customer data that they want. Landlords could already being treated as "partners" and thus negotiating for and receiving user data in order "to offer goods and services" and "to improve the "UX". Is this a fair price to extract from a residential "captive audience?"
- _RPM 10y agoVery interesting you say this. I thought this was happening in my apartment after being up for a couple days. SSL connections would keep getting broken with resources loading over HTTP, I thought that I was getting MITM'd by property management and injecting advertisements. It would be a pretty good idea.
- Something1234 10y agoSo what was actually happening?
- _RPM 10y agoI'm not sure. I ended up getting some sleep and then kind of just accepted that it might be happening. Sites would load a 1x1 pixel. It may have been my Windows machine was infected. I haven't seen this happen on my Linux machine yet. It's worth noting that I have since moved out of that apartment.
- superuser2 10y agoI think conspiring with an ISP in this way would be unlikely. More likely, "free WiFi" managed by the landlord would be included in your rent, and they'd decline to let an ISP run any cable because "What do you need that for? We're already giving you free WiFi!"
- rmc 10y agoThis would be illegal under EU data protection law. Thank god for strong data protection law.
- zeveb 10y ago> I live in an apartment. Chances are good that you do, too: Tens of millions of Americans live in apartment buildings, and in medium-to-large cities these structures account for between a quarter and a half of all housing units. No, if less than half of Americans live in apartments then chances aren't good that that a random reader does. > More people are renting these days than ever before. Not true, according to http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/the-life-of-american-workers-in-1915.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/the-life-of-america... (which was posted just today): 'If you were alive in 1915, chances are you rented your house or apartment; the ratio of renters to homeowners was about 4 to 1 in 1920. In contrast, by 2004, 69 percent of American families owned rather than rented their residence, although that proportion slipped to 64 percent by the fourth quarter of 2015.' So far fewer Americans are renting than ever before. I don't disagree that it's poor behaviour for landlords to grant monopolies to ISPs. But folks do have a choice in where they live, and it seems to me that monopoly-free units are likely to rent for more.
- Retra 10y ago"Good chances" doesn't mean 50/50. It doesn't really mean anything. It vaguely means that the author is welling to bet on it, and smart people have bet on far less than that. >So far fewer Americans are renting than ever before. In 1915, there were ~100M people in the US. At 20% homeowners, that gives 80M renters. 36% of the current 300M+ population gives > 80M renters. Therefore, there are more renters today than there were in 1915.
- Dotnaught 10y agoInteresting how the FCC will intercede to prevent physical gatekeeping by property owners but doesn't do much to prevent the virtual gatekeeping practiced by platform owners like Apple.
- jjawssd 10y agoWhatever it takes for us to connect to Silicon Valley
- MichaelBurge 10y agoI don't know about internet, but I've declined to allow them to install satellite dishes. Their technicians will drill holes through your roof with reckless abandon, and the tenant won't care because they'll likely be moved out by the time the water damage really sets in from their improperly filled hole. Not to mention you can't have a one-time installation: They want to reinstall a new one every time so they can charge the tenant an installation fee. Even if they offer the installation for free, I want their barely-trained technicians to drill holes in my property as much as a fisherman wants them to drill holes in his boat.
- amyjess 10y agoJust letting you know, the FCC prohibits landlords from disallowing satellite dishes and broadcast antennas from being installed in areas controlled by the tenant. You can disallow them in common areas (like the roof, which you mentioned), sure, but the FCC will come down on you hard if they get wind of you trying to interfere with them installing a satellite dish on their balcony.
- dragonwriter 10y agoFor reference on the above: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/installing-consumer-owned-antennas-and-satellite-dishes https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/installing-consumer-own...
- greenleafjacob 10y agoWhat about the immediate exterior of their floor / unit?
- rahimnathwani 10y agoExterior walls are common areas owned by the landlord: "OTARD rules do not apply to common areas that are owned by a landlord, a community association or jointly by condominium owners. These common areas may include the roof or exterior walls of a multiple dwelling unit."
- 10y ago
- gist 10y ago> For existing buildings, stop companies from being able to sign contractual provisions limiting access to inside wiring. Make it illegal for landlords to get any form of side payment whatsoever for cutting off our choice of ISPs. Sure easy fix. Just void existing contracts that were valid when written. And this is coming from a lawyer no less.
- abjx 10y agoAre you suggesting that the legislature cannot pass a law that voids part or all of a contract that was valid when written?
- gist 10y agoHonestly do you really think that this rises to that level of government intervention in business practices of private companies?
- abjx 10y agoI thought you might have meant that a statute could not affect an existing contract. I had never heard of that before, but governments sometimes compensate people who suffer losses because of legislative action, so there might be something to it. I don't want the government to interfere much at all in private affairs, and I don't think "there should be a law against" everything I don't like. I am not sure in this case, but conspiracies to prevent third parties (tenants and ISPs) from conducting business are pernicious. I would never enter into such an agreement myself.
- st3v3r 10y agoYES
- georgemcbay 10y agoI do. The current situation massively fucks citizens and our current Internet situation is sad joke in most of the country because of it, and the Internet is important infrastructure. Of course this is a matter the government should deal with.
- cgy1 10y agoMy last apartment complex offered 100Mbit fiber for $50/month. My current apartment complex offers CenturyLink gigabit fiber. I guess I lucked out.
- dawnerd 10y agoMy apartment has just about every ISP in the area including locally run fiber that runs 60/month for gigabit. I actually laugh when I see fliers from the other companies offering "blazing fast" internet for 100+
- atburrow 10y agoIn Chicago, I'm currently living in a high rise where the fastest plan I can get is 24 Mbps for around $80/mo. My high rise has an exclusivity contract with AT&T U-Verse. I've spoken with AT&T reps and they can't offer any higher speeds. I also talked to property management and they said there's nothing they can do for me. They are locked into an exclusivity contract with AT&T for the wires in the building. Does anyone have experience dealing with properties who claim to have exclusivity contracts? I talked to people at Webpass, and they've stated it is available in my area. They'd come in and set everything up free of charge. I don't see the downside for my building to allow Webpass to come in.
- mikefivedeuce 10y agoTypically the exclusivity agreement is a marketing exclusivity only. It's also true that AT&T may have maintained ownership of the lines, especially if it is fiber direct to the unit. If that's the case, any new provider would need to install new lines, which is costly once the building is complete. The ROI likely won't pencil for the new provider.
- hanklazard 10y agoI'm in a high rise in Boston, similar situation but with Comcast. I also spoke with Webpass a few days ago, they say that my building has a revenue sharing exclusive agreement with Comcast and that Webass does not participate in revenue sharing agreements. This feels like it should be illegal but my sister, an attorney, did not see anything obviously wrong under current law. I'd like to see that change.
- pyvpx 10y agoin a MDU, the owner owns the common spaces. that includes risers and inside wiring. they're free to sell, lease, or restrict the rights to whomever they please. just like wifi ratings for hotels have become a "thing", so must exclusivity agreements and broadband providers when it comes to apartment/housing hunting. it would be extremely difficult bordering on impossible, in my opinion, for a law in the US to prohibit property owner rights in a fashion that prevents these kind of agreements. only a "market" solution would work here. and of course, that's very difficult on its own.
- foota 10y agoI've always thought it would be fairly lucrative to offer to act as an isp (w/o lock in) for an apartment complex.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWe had this idea with my co-worker the other day, about becoming an apartment complex ISP, getting a high-bandwidth connection to the whole building and wiring every apartment with fiber optic links. Then, we'd put a server farm in the basement and offer "Internet + compute services". Like VPSes for techies, and OnLive equivalent for gamers, except the roundtrip for the latter would be down to the basement and back up, instead of down to Australia, through China and back. The grander idea is to have apartment buildings with their own basement clouds, where tenants could off-load computational needs. Sounds like a much more energy-efficient solution than person having either an overpowered device or a low-power one in constant connection with clouds on the other side of the planet. Moreover, this idea was part of a general brainstorming about ways to dumb the cloud back down, so that it's distributed compute-on-demand infrastructure, and not the shitty third-party data silos it's now. After reading the comments here I realized that while my friend and I would have the best of intentions, if ISPs in general were to be allowed to do such a thing, they'd fuck it up exactly in the way they do in this case.
- foota 10y agoBuilding an admittedly really cool sounding highly distributed cloud platform hardly sounds like dumbing the cloud back down :p
- TeMPOraL 10y ago"Dumbing down" in the sense like ISPs are supposed to be "dumb pipes". I'd like the cloud to be a dynamically allocated compute resource - i.e. the end-user rents out computing power and provides both the data and the code that runs against it (which may or may not be licensed from a third party). The goal is to separate out the code providers and compute providers, and to keep the user always in control of their data.
- ndespres 10y agoA client of mine in NYC was getting gouged for Internet service in their office building, by the incumbent building-wide ISP which seemed to be operated by the landlord. When it became necessary to upgrade to a higher tier of service, their only upgrade options from the incumbent provider were $1000+ per month above market rate. When we brought in service from a competing provider, we learned that we would have to pay the building's ISP a rental fee for use of the "risers"- they owned the rights to the conduit from the basement to my clients' suite, and charged us rent at what I considered an unfair rate on our use of it. I think many landlords around here signed away rights on telecom services without knowing better, or set up exclusive agreements like this and those mentioned in the article, but this was the worst offender I've ever encountered.
- mey 10y agoAs a member of an HOA board with 7 builds and 13 units, is there a reasonable way to go about setting up a common conduit system so any ISP could come in? Currently only Comcast had run lines with the original building of the property and of course didn't trench properly so no other ISP could come in. Has anyone done this before?
- jdavis703 10y agoIt's done in my building. Gigabit Ethernet is run to each unit. The ISP (Comcast or Webpass) will then hook up the correct wires that are in the basement.
- colejohnson66 10y agoIsn't it just connecting a coax cable to the wires underground?
- mey 10y agoNot for Fiber
- pyvpx 10y agoyou designate an MPOE (minimum point of entry) and then have cabling/conduit installed from the MPOE to units/residences/NIDs. then your HOA owns the "inside wiring" and, with the right amount of lawyer magic, each unit can own/control the destiny of the cable/wire/conduit that goes from the MPOE to them. then the real trick is getting the ISP you want to play ball. I know of a few instances where Comcast just won't entertain the setup whatsoever. Unfortunately, in telecommunications, largess is the name of the game...
- mey 10y agoAwesome, thanks for giving me the term to further research. There is at least one other ISP that doesn't have access to the property plus in theory Google Fiber should be coming to town (PDX) so I expect this issue is going to become more pressing.
- rconti 10y agoNot at all the same, but I'm in a house in Redwood City and it's frustrating that part of the city has broadband choice (you can get Wave/Astound OR Comcast) but my part doesn't. I don't even really understand why -- I don't get what part of the infrastructure is owned by who, how it's decided, and how to push for change. There are local providers such as Sonic who are rolling out Gigabit in certain parts of the Bay Area, and who insist "the more people in your neighborhood that sign up, the more likely we are to bring FTTH to your neighborhood!" but there's no way of judging which one is the more "likely" bet, which is frustrating. I wish there was someone I could just throw a couple thousand dollars at to solve the problem, but no doubt it's vastly, vastly more expensive for them than that.
- sseveran 10y agoI live in Redwood City and my building offers both AT&T and Comcast. The last place I lived in sunnyvale offered 4 different tv/broadband providers. You should certainly ask what a complex offers when considering where to live.
- scurvy 10y agoYou could try contacting Wave about a direct connection. They recently acquired Layer42 and have more fiber up and down the peninsula than they know what to do with. It would cost a few $k, but you mentioned that's OK.
- exabrial 10y agoGoogle Fiber announced several months ago they were moving into my apartment complex and construction is expected to be completed with 8-12mo. In the mean time, I got a new job where I get to work from home, so I figured I probably -ought- to buy internet instead of tethering. Shortest contract I could sign to get the advertised pricing was 3 years from the incumbent telco provider here. They offered me the "blazing" package that had a whole 10mbit upstream.
- ohio2016 10y agoA few years back, an Ohio blogger was complaining loudly about the practice of "slamming" utilities (among other things) by The Connor Group. The blogger got sued for defamation.
- curun1r 10y agoA note to anyone from Webpass who might be reading this: Please bring back the map showing the buildings where Webpass is installed...I looked recently and couldn't find it. Or, if this is too confusing now that you have many more installed buildings, please provide a list. When I selected my last apartment, I knew I wanted to try Webpass. So I started there, pulled up the map of buildings that had it installed and limited my search to those buildings. Given how much better the service is than Comcast/AT&T, I can see a lot of people who work out of a home office wanting to do something similar. You could even try to work with the buildings that have allowed you in to post apartment listings on your site...seems like a win-win-win (more webpass customers, faster filling of vacancies in webpass buildings, residents get better internet.)
- jakobegger 10y agoIn Austria there's a law (might be an EU regulation) that requires the formerly state-owned phone company to rent the "last mile" cables to other companies. Made internet a lot cheaper (16Mbit ADSL costs around 25€ per month). However, for some reason, private cable companies do not need to share their infrastructure, so if you want faster Internet you are still stuck with the local cable company.
- pyvpx 10y agothis is called local-loop unbundling. there are various "hysterical raisins" (aka historical reasons) that cable companies are exempt from this regulatory requirement. the main one being their infrastructure was not publicly funded at any time (ignoring tax breaks and a bevy of other direct/indirect public subsidies) there is also BSA or bitstream access where, in the case of DSL, the ATM circuit is provisioned and carried by the incumbent and then handed off to the competitive provider in a central location. of course, this isn't all that useful since it's still the incumbent who has to provision the circuit, maintain the copper and equipment, and generally muck up the customer experience despite not being the labelled provider.
- upofadown 10y ago>And these shenanigans will only stop when cities and national leaders require that every building have neutral fiber/wireless facilities that make it easy for residents to switch services when they want to. There is no particular reason to limit this to multi-tenant buildings or wired broadband. The problem of monopoly last mile access comes up in different contexts. The same legal solution should work for most any situation.
- jsmith0295 10y agoAt least in Ohio, the pricing is all the same regardless of whether or not you're in an apartment. So it's really more like you're selecting an Internet provider as a part of the renting process. My concern with having shared utilities is you'll have to wait for some underfunded bueracracy to fix things if they break, which is likely to take even longer than Time Warner. Currently, WOW! and AT&T are actually quite quick about this where I live. In my opinion, if you were to regulate it, it should just be to prevent the price gouging.
- larrysalibra 10y agoThis problem has been solved other places. For example, in Hong Kong, all operators have a statutory right of access to common areas of buildings to provision services to customers in the building. http://www.ofca.gov.hk/filemanager/ofca/common/Industry/telecom/inote0004_12e.pdf http://www.ofca.gov.hk/filemanager/ofca/common/Industry/tele... Incorporated Owners/Building Management: "(a) should not impose any fees, deposit, access charge, administrative charge, escort charge or rental charge on the Operators for the access of the building, the use of the common parts of the building or the use of the in-building telecommunications system of the building for the provision of services to residents or occupiers of the building (b) should not enter into any commercial contract which will unreasonably restrict the right of a resident or occupier or deprives a resident or occupier of the right, to have access to the public telecommunications services of his choice. Any such agreement is void to the extent that it imposes such restriction;" Would be nice to see similar legislation adopted in the USA.
- JadeNB 10y agoWhat is the legal force of 'should not' (as opposed to 'must not')?
- matthewmcg 10y agoThe last sentence is what does the work--the landlord can enter into a contrary agreement but it will have no legal effect.
- pc86 10y ago> And then they’ll add little clauses saying “if any part of this agreement turns out to be illegal, you can cut out that portion of the agreement and the rest of it will stand.” As will every attorney in the world for any contract. I don't think I've ever seen a contract without this. Comcast does enough ridiculous and illegal stuff, we do not need to reframe standard practices as bad simply because it's Comcast that's doing it.
- Qwertious 10y agoTo quote the Steam ToS: >TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, NEITHER VALVE, VALVE EU, THEIR LICENSORS, NOR THEIR AFFILIATES, NOR ANY OF VALVE’S OR VALVE EU’S SERVICE PROVIDERS, SHALL BE LIABLE IN ANY WAY FOR LOSS OR DAMAGE OF ANY KIND RESULTING [...] Note the phrase "to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law" - that means that if a section is illegal, then it's not to the extent of including that section. It's pretty commonly used and it's actually pretty nifty, although I'd appreciate it more if companies didn't try to claim bloody everything with it attached.
- hammock 10y agoSo many things wrong with this argument. The biggest mistake is the idea that there is no competition. Of course there is, the telecoms are still competing with each other to get these agreements with the landlords. Still the renter lacks a choice right? Not so fast. If internet is so important to you, as OP tries to make the case with questionable statistics near the top, then choose a building with internet you like. The world is not Burger King where everything is have it your way. There are a finite number of Oreo flavors and yet no one is writing blog posts demanding their congressman do something about it.
- hanklazard 10y agoSeems like the FCC disagrees with you, which is why exclusive agreements are not technically allowed. As the article points out, property owners and incumbent ISPs have found ways to get around this rule by simply not signing with anyone else. Oreo cookies are not a critical information and communication system, so the government doesn't need to regulate decisions regarding flavor options on these delicious snacks.
- dhimes 10y agoIt is illegal for Oreos to make it so that Keebler cannot be sold.
- hammock 10y agoIt's not illegal for a restaurant to exclusively offer Oreos and not Keebler. We are talking about renters.