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I agree, there's a retaliatory impulse against those who seem to be arbitrarily price-discriminating... like norm-enforcers taking nothing rather than an unfair

by gojomo 14y ago

I agree, there's a retaliatory impulse against those who seem to be arbitrarily price-discriminating... like norm-enforcers taking nothing rather than an unfair split in the ultimatum game. It explains some of the emotion around this issue. But if that effect were strong enough in this market, would it require the FCC to ban the tethering charge? (The FTC didn't have to ban Amazon's pricing experiments.) Most people don't get that deep into it -- and if they do, there are so very many Apple and subscription-service pricing oddities they can also get worked up about. Also, the ones most likely to apply a 'packets are packets' reasoning are the richer/sophisticated/multidevice/heavy-users, who also on another dimension are most willing to pay for the time-savings and OS-integration of an official solution. As someone currently paying for Verizon/iOS tethering support, I do perceive a differentiation against an app-store or commodity-bandwidth offering, or using my own Apple Developer License to compile iProxy/iphone-socks-proxy. I get one-click activation, in the OS settings panel, along a path that Apple/Verizon have designed and support.

_delirium 14y ago
It's a good question, and somewhat hard to disentangle. My view is that there's a strong opinion from techies that "the tubes" should be a commodity/utility service, and therefore there's resistance to various kinds of provider control/segmentation of uses. Basically, this view holds that pipes should be treated as utility or common-carrier type provisioning. Having that kind of view does correlate with being a heavier user, but I think also has an independent basis in technical/political ideals of what the internet should be, i.e. the correlation is due to a common underlying cause. I think it's probably not strong enough to dissuade that activity through market forces, though, because the percentage of users who have that technical knowledge and those technical ideals is quite small. I'm one example, I think: I'm wary of both tethering charges and of some content providers' attempts to market-segment iPad content, and I own neither a smartphone nor an iPad, so it's not really based on saving me money. (Offtopic edit: Huh, are you the same 'gojomo' from Bitzi? If so, I'm the 'delirium' that contributed some code to the Bitzi Bitcollider something like 10 years ago, to extract video metadata. Thought that handle sounded familiar.)
- gojomo 14y ago
  As a Verizon tethering subscriber, this decision will save me money... but I can separate the principle from my particular situation. Summed over all cases where a popular bit of price/service control is dictated by a federal agency, and also quite possibly in this particular case, the results are likely to be net-negative for consumers. So I'd rather regulators never intervene in this way. Their decisionmaking apparatus is unable to limit itself to the few reliably beneficial cases, instead intervening in many other cases that are just superficially attractive. On the other hand, if these sorts of differential pricing schemes get chiseled away over time by competition -- perhaps by giving other companies and technologies the marketing hook they need to make inroads, because after all packets are packets -- consumers win other benefits. Even if it takes more time than an 'FCC rescue'. (I am the Bitzi gojomo! Seeing your comments here, I figured you were the same delirium... thanks for your contributions so many years ago!)
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by gojomo 14y ago

_delirium 14y ago

It's a good question, and somewhat hard to disentangle. My view is that there's a strong opinion from techies that "the tubes" should be a commodity/utility service, and therefore there's resistance to various kinds of provider control/segmentation of uses. Basically, this view holds that pipes should be treated as utility or common-carrier type provisioning. Having that kind of view does correlate with being a heavier user, but I think also has an independent basis in technical/political ideals of what the internet should be, i.e. the correlation is due to a common underlying cause. I think it's probably not strong enough to dissuade that activity through market forces, though, because the percentage of users who have that technical knowledge and those technical ideals is quite small. I'm one example, I think: I'm wary of both tethering charges and of some content providers' attempts to market-segment iPad content, and I own neither a smartphone nor an iPad, so it's not really based on saving me money. (Offtopic edit: Huh, are you the same 'gojomo' from Bitzi? If so, I'm the 'delirium' that contributed some code to the Bitzi Bitcollider something like 10 years ago, to extract video metadata. Thought that handle sounded familiar.)

gojomo 14y ago
As a Verizon tethering subscriber, this decision will save me money... but I can separate the principle from my particular situation. Summed over all cases where a popular bit of price/service control is dictated by a federal agency, and also quite possibly in this particular case, the results are likely to be net-negative for consumers. So I'd rather regulators never intervene in this way. Their decisionmaking apparatus is unable to limit itself to the few reliably beneficial cases, instead intervening in many other cases that are just superficially attractive. On the other hand, if these sorts of differential pricing schemes get chiseled away over time by competition -- perhaps by giving other companies and technologies the marketing hook they need to make inroads, because after all packets are packets -- consumers win other benefits. Even if it takes more time than an 'FCC rescue'. (I am the Bitzi gojomo! Seeing your comments here, I figured you were the same delirium... thanks for your contributions so many years ago!)
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