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> Is there some moral or legal obligation that a service's price must tie directly to its immediate costs? Yes. Verizon and other wireless telecoms have built
by w1ntermute 14y ago
> Is there some moral or legal obligation that a service's price must tie directly to its immediate costs?
Yes. Verizon and other wireless telecoms have built their businesses on the back of a limited, public resource (namely, wireless spectrum) leased from the government (and therefore the people) of the United States. Therefore, they have a moral (should also be legal, but isn't at the moment) responsibility to act in an ethical manner.
If this were a market without such barriers to entry, I would say that they're free to do whatever they want, because competitors would enter the market and force them to change their policies. But when it comes to wireless telecoms, it's not possible for such competitors to materialize.
- eli 14y agoWhat is unethical about segmenting customers based on the devices they use? Would it be better to do away with all forms of "unlimited" plans and just charge per MB?
- w1ntermute 14y agoUnlimited plans have already been done away with by everyone except Sprint. What's at issue here is them charging extra for data bought by the byte. I believe that you should be able to purchase data and share it amongst as many devices as you want (a small activation fee per cellular device may be acceptable, but nothing of the sort should exist for tethering, since there is no perceptible difference for the carriers) . This is how it works for wired internet, and I don't see why wireless should be any different (with the exception of any wireless specific network management, but that's not at issue here).