11 ms·
Sprint Will Sell a $12 Wireless Plan that Only Connects to Facebook or Twitter
- valarauca1 12y agoThis is very common in 3rd world countries. Where facebook, and twitter will be free. The idea is that facebook and twitter get members who'll always be able to connect for free. And those social media platforms encourage people to go out on the rest of the web and incur large fees from the cellular service (or pay for a data plan).
- walterbell 12y agoWithout a neutral net, the "rest of the web" will offer a very different menu of services than today's web. In developing countries, those deals were initiated by Facebook and Twitter. Vodafone declined this option, http://www.cellular-news.com/story/Operators/64337.php http://www.cellular-news.com/story/Operators/64337.php "That the company has been approached by Facebook to do so was revealed by the Group's CEO, Vittorio Colao who was speaking at a Vodafone shareholders meeting in New York. He said that he had been directly approached by Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg but declined to their proposal saying that it didn't make sense. "There is no reason why I should give my network capacity for free." he stated."
- Scoundreller 12y agoI'm surprised Facebook and Twitter weren't willing to front (some) of the cost just to get their user counts up and first-mover advantage. Crudely, each Twitter user is worth $100 to the company. Double that for Facebook. But I guess free is better, if they can get it. They'll consider paying in subsequent iterations.
- walterbell 12y agoApparently some telcos have been burned by their Facebook data deal. http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate-telecom-deals-abroad/293741/ http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate-telec... "Yet the future of the deals remains unclear, particularly after Facebook has soured several operators on the arrangements. Multiple people with knowledge of the partnerships said Facebook cut the deals for subsidized data without paying a cent, often strong-arming carriers into adopting its conditions and footing the data bills. ... Three carriers with sizable global reach -- Vodafone, Telefónica and Singtel -- have staunchly resisted Facebook's advances. Several others, analysts said, are showing rising concerns over the bottom line benefits of zero-rating deals. ... Communicating zero-rating deals to subscribers proved more difficult than imagined, the former employee said. The packages free up data on Twitter, but not other websites, a source of frustration and confusion to users."
- valarauca1 12y agoI'm an open advocate of net neutrality. I'm just stating this isn't a new practice, and the large tech companies are very happy to shit on your net neutrality freedom provided it pads their bottom line.
- josho 12y agoNow it all makes sense. This HN crowd views the world as paying $20/mth for Xgb of data. But, the companies fighting against becoming dumb pipes much prefer to charge $5/mth for a base data plan, plus the $12 unlimited social package, plus the $10 for 40 hours of music package, etc. From a business perspective it's brilliant: selling benefits, as opposed to a commodity (bandwidth). Ie. The price charged for the good sold no longer has relation to the cost of the good. Now just imagine if we bought other commodities the same way. Would you buy gas by distance, e.g. 'enough gas to drive from LA to NY for $50†' -- a great deal if you drive a Hummer, but pretty bad for a Prius. †The actual cost would be much more, but you get the point.
- mikeash 12y agoIf you took a Prius C and drove really conservatively, I think you're only off by a factor of 2 or so. I think a better analogy might be something like water or electricity. Imagine separate line items on your electric bill for the refrigerator, the TV, the lights, etc. You bought a game console, that's $50/month extra for the game console electrical package.
- josho 12y agoI like your example better, because the energy utilities are quite similar to communications with active monopolies in some regions, a regulated environment, and huge infrastructure investments. With energy the infrastructure is regulated, with regulated rates. While the provider of the actual electricity is competitive without duplicating the infrastructure. This makes so much sense, it should be clear to treat telecommunications the same way.
- mikeash 12y agoAnother example I thought was effective was to compare it to the postal service, and to get political about the picking and choosing. Imagine, for example, if the postal service delivered the Washington Post normally, but charged extra for National Review. (Reverse or substitute them for people with different political leanings.) I used this when talking to my father recently, who leans fairly right and has been posting some links using the party line "free market" and "less regulation" arguments against net neutrality, and it seemed to make an impression.
- 01Michael10 12y agoI can't believe this story is not getting more traction on HN. My submission was like the fourth one... $12 for access to one app/website? How is this even any kind of deal? I pay $32 for the whole Internet on a T-Mobile plan that is unlimited (OK capped at 5GB). Worse, it's no deal for the poor who now will be conditioned that Facebook is the "Internet". EDIT: This submission has made the HN front page but then the url and title was changed. Go figure...
- kevando 12y agoI think this might be something that we continue to deal with. If people just want to use Facebook on their phone, then that's what the carriers will give them. Just because the tech community thinks that is dumb; if 10 million "poor" people want that service, they'll get it.
- beamatronic 12y agoMy concern is, in 10 years, a generation of people will think this is how it has always been.
- VLM 12y agoAnd the only way it should be.
- opendais 12y agoThere is no reason that can't be done by just selling them bandwidth, regardless. Facebook isn't a massive bandwidth cost.
- 01Michael10 12y agoI hardy think it is only the "tech" community that will realize this plan is "dumb". Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they are an idiot... The real fear is other carriers will adopt this idea and then jack up the prices on normal data plans which will railroad poorer people into these types of plans.
- ryan-c 12y agohttp://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5514 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5514
- dang 12y agoWe changed the url from http://www.droid-life.com/2014/07/30/12-a-month-for-facebook-sprint-tramples-over-net-neutrality-with-new-prepaid-plan/ http://www.droid-life.com/2014/07/30/12-a-month-for-facebook.... Better url suggestions welcome.
- 01Michael10 12y agoWTF? There was a reason I choose that url... It was a better article and had a better title. The url and title you changed it to was already submitted by someone else two hours before me but it never gained any traction. EDIT: My original title and url... $12 A Month For Facebook – Sprint Tramples Over Net Neutrality With New Prepaid Plan http://www.droid-life.com/2014/07/30/12-a-month-for-facebook-sprint-tramples-over-net-neutrality-with-new-prepaid-plan/ http://www.droid-life.com/2014/07/30/12-a-month-for-facebook...
- post_break 12y agoYeah that's some nice moderating right there.
- dang 12y agoThe title was "Sprint Tramples Over Net Neutrality" and the article began, "Today, Sprint dispensed with all subtlety. Without any pretense of net neutrality whatsoever..." It should be obvious that that is far too tendentious for HN. We're looking for pieces without blatant spin. Readers can make up their own minds. We changed to the WSJ article not because it was best, but because it was the handiest one that wasn't breathy with drama. That's why I asked for pointers to more substantive articles, if there are any. As for the original submission not gaining traction, (a) that's fraught with randomness, and (b) traction doesn't prove goodness—if it did, linkbait (for example) wouldn't be a problem.
- bduerst 12y agoThank you for putting in the time to cut the noise.
- 12y ago
- opendais 12y agoThis is pure evil. and exactly why we need Net Neutrality. http://willchatham.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/net.png http://willchatham.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/net.png They really want to make this real. :|
- quink 12y agoI made this five years ago. It's rather fascinating to see it inch ever closer to reality.
- opendais 12y agoFascinating? I'd use terrifying personally.
- quink 12y agoI meant fascinating in a morbid way. It was also interesting to see in the WCIT leaks a submission by Ofcom that's surprisingly like my creation here. Edit: http://i.imgur.com/roimIHy.jpg http://i.imgur.com/roimIHy.jpg And yes, this was a regulatory agency submitting this to the IT-bloody-U. Not even a telco.
- opendais 12y agoMy god. They must be stopped.
- quink 12y agoNo, not them. Not as much as Internet.org and everyone associated with it and Facebook Zero and even Wikipedia Zero should be prosecuted with extreme prejudice. Not necessarily in a judicial court, but definitely crucified in the court of public opinion.
- tormeh 12y ago"the court of public opinion" I don't think that court cares. It usually doesn't.
- justinpaulson 12y agoHow does this even work though? Most of the things that are interesting on twitter or pinterest are links to other sites. They really lost their value if you can't even click through the links.
- al2o3cr 12y ago"They really lost their value if you can't even click through the links" To the user, certainly. On the other hand, Sprint still has the $12.
- prostoalex 12y agoYou see a warning page prior to being redirected to an outside URL.
- B-Con 12y agoThis is Facebook and Twitter. Maybe most of the interesting content to you and me are links, but we aren't most people. Many (most?) people want to see uploaded pictures, write brief messages to each other, and catch up on people's statuses. That is probably the market they're targeting.
- smackfu 12y agoThey also follow Buzzfeed, and click on the interesting sounding headlines.
- ljosa 12y agoAOL all over again.
- bitJericho 12y agoThis is why we desperately need net neutrality laws.
- bellerocky 12y agoNet neutrality is about the desire of ISPs to get paid from both ends of a connection. ISPs want to get money from consumers for getting access to content producers and service providers and from the latter in turn for their content being made available to consumers. The current system is that ISPs are just being paid by consumers for access to what's put online by content and service providers. Content and service providers get access to consumers for free right now. This plan by sprint limits access to consumers of this kind of connection to a single service that the consumer opts into. It seems relevant, but I'm not sure. Would net neutrality regulation prohibit something like this?
- Artemis2 12y agoYes, because net neutrality is mainly about selling only "the Internet" and giving equal access to all websites to all customers. You are hearing more about the connection-throttling issues Netflix has with Verizon currently, but it ultimately falls under net neutrality too, as Verizon is trying to de-prioritize connections to Netflix.
- pjc50 12y agoIf it doesn't prevent this, it's not proper net neutrality.
- prostoalex 12y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8110919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8110919
- fleitz 12y agoWhy? What is wrong with offering this service to people who like it? The only thing worse than comcast determining what kind of internet you have is letting the FCC determine what kind of internet you have.
- hashmymustache 12y agoI can't imagine Facebook is in favor since they wouldn't be able to get any mobile ad revenue
- qbrass 12y agoThe ads would just go to storefronts hosted by Facebook, who get a larger cut of the revenue for hosting them.
- tobyjsullivan 12y agoA preview of a world without net neutrality. In the future, your $60 internet connection includes "access to 500 premium websites!" The rest of the Internet isn't necessary to the "average" consumer. Like with cable television... Or maybe I'm wrong about the corporate vision.
- prawn 12y agoAnd they don't need to worry about torrents and piracy and all that hassle. Can see that appealing greatly to big media companies and the politicians they're in with.
- prostoalex 12y agoNet neutrality is less of a hot topic in the wireless world compared to wired. In wired world, the carriers were granted monopoly to dig the trenches, and the fact that they now abuse that monopoly without giving access to other players is what riles people. Wireless world is fairly fragmented - carriers are separate from equipment companies, which are separate from tower operators. Anybody can buy up some equipment and tower space and just start offering mobile voice+broadband. Or start on MVNO to piggyback existing infrastructure and expand from there.
- twistedpair 12y ago> Net neutrality is less of a hot topic in the wireless world compared to wired. Really? Unless you can participate in the multi-billion dollar spectrum auction, you can't use any of those towers or disparate device providers. The right to use a large block of spectrum in a given geographic area is a monopoly of sorts for that carrier. Given the capital and scale needed to enter the market, it's no wonder we have so few wireless carriers to choose from.
- superuser2 12y agoIt would be very expensive for me to start a chip fabrication plant, but that doesn't make the industry a monopoly. Just one that requires a lot of capital to enter.
- edwinnathaniel 12y agoI find it interesting to see the reaction of HN crowds. Services like this is common in 3rd-world country: they charge you for a very small monthly fee to connect to a select web services as opposed to the "all of the internet". Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Watsapp, BBM + E-mail only. The services might grow or reduce depending on the popularity of the web services.
- wmf 12y agoIt goes without saying that the HN audience of startup founders who want to "disrupt" Instagram/WhatsApp/BBM/etc. are opposed to this.
- Guvante 12y agoNothing to do with diruption. The sites I browse most frequently (by an order of magnitude) are HN and Reddit. Neither of these are useful on such a plan, since the entire purpose is linking the internet at large. However if such plans become popular, we could potentially lose (or pay lots to preserve) the ability to frequent such sites.
- the_ancient 12y agoSo this is really coming true http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-12-15-net_neutrality_loses_whatif.jpg http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-12-15-net_neutrality_l...
- quink 12y agoWhich is why I made it. Five years ago. As a warning. Yet here we are with this having been in the WCIT leaks if people didn't have enough of a warning: http://i.imgur.com/roimIHy.jpg http://i.imgur.com/roimIHy.jpg The stuff on the right was created by a regulatory agency acting as part of the ITU. The I. T. U. And yet it took John Oliver for the average person to start at least mildly caring.
- jrockway 12y ago$5 a month for news is less than I pay for a subscription to The New York Times, but it's included for free with your hypothetical evil plan.
- quink 12y agoJust to clarify, TELCO's great value bundles may not include premium subscriptions to our peering partners. Unless otherwise indicated what we have partnered to provide is a prioritised connection to our peering partner to deliver to you and your family value content quota-free at an affordable price :) If you'd like to upgrade your NY Times beyond our $5 News package and access premium content you can do so from the TELCO portal and additional charges will be on your TELCO bill for a convenient single-stop experience! Additionally, we're currently running a bundle on newspaper experiences where if you bundle both New York Times premium content and another premium news experience where we've partnered with in our Atlantic news offerings so you can get three for the cost of just $10 and three months at half price! Thanks for loving our great value, we're constantly working on getting our customers the best possible deals and love to hear great feedback like yours :)
- jrockway 12y ago
- slg 12y agoIt is worth noting that this will be a good deal for a lot of consumers. That is the problem with not having strong net neutrality laws. We now need to educate people on why something like this would seem so attractive but will lead to bad things in the long term. It is a smart move by Sprint. If the first salvos in the war over net neutrality are like this and become incredibly popular, it will easy to use them as a precedent for less popular moves down the road.
- 01Michael10 12y agoWhat alternate reality do you live in? This is not a good deal for anyone!
- slg 12y agoThere are a large percentage of people who use the internet primarily for social networking. For those people, a plan like this is a lot cheaper than a plan that allows them access to the whole internet. For less than $17 you can have a social media device that allows you to stay connected with family and friends and provides very limited voice and text connectivity for emergencies. This is the ideal type of plan for a teenager (with maybe the addition of unlimited texts) for less than half the price of most prepaid plans and a quarter of the price of most contract plans.
- 01Michael10 12y agoUmmmmm... It's great if someone only uses one or two social networks. Most young people use four or five different social networks at least so this plan would be useless. Any teen who had this plan would get beat up in school... I get the whole internet for $32 a month that is unlimited (5GB cap) with unlimited texting. Come on dude...
- modeless 12y agoEvery unencrypted byte your last mile provider can see gives them power over you. Here's the only way to fix this: VPNs for everyone. Every single byte encrypted. Your last mile provider becomes a dumb pipe to your real ISP, who actually has competition and therefore an incentive to give you good service. Anything less is unworkable in the long run; it's a race back to the cable subscription model and the only question is how long it takes to get there.
- Karunamon 12y agoAs far as I know, the application connections for Facebook and Twitter are done via HTTPS APIs.
- modeless 12y agoThe payloads are encrypted, but the DNS lookups aren't encrypted, and neither are the IP headers with the IPs of Facebook and Twitter servers in them. That's how Sprint can distinguish Facebook and Twitter traffic from other traffic, and that's what a VPN would fix.
- Karunamon 12y agoI guess I don't see what encryption has to do with the topic at hand then, since they'd ostensibly only allow access to a known set of addresses with this plan.
- modeless 12y agoIf everyone used VPNs as a matter of course, it would prevent the oligopoly last-mile ISPs like Sprint and Verizon from having the power to implement anti-net-neutrality plans like this in the first place. It would be a much healthier state for the industry as a whole.
- tzs 12y ago> If everyone used VPNs as a matter of course, it would prevent the oligopoly last-mile ISPs like Sprint and Verizon from having the power to implement anti-net-neutrality plans like this in the first place. How? To use a VPN you have to be able to connect to your VPN server. If you have a service plan that only allows connections to IP addresses that belong to Twitter and Facebook, I don't see how you are going to use your VPN to connect elsewhere.
- debt 12y ago"For that same price, they could choose instead to connect only with Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest—or for $10 more, enjoy unlimited use of all four. Another $5 gets them unlimited streaming of a music app of their choice." This is pretty horrifying. Although if this gets more people connected to the internet(at least in some limited capacity) then that's probably a net good for civilization; ability to reach more people in a disaster, more people get educated(at least in a roundabout way). I think we'll likely see more services like this as most internet users probably spend their time on only a handful of websites anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if FB started buying up some of the larger content holders(BuzzFeed, etc.) so as to consolidate the content under one umbrella without having to worry about copyright issues. I'm just saying, for instance, how would this handle YouTube embeds? YouTube just wouldn't work in this scenario? I assume FB will launch their own video network as well. I assume these types of deals are quite lucrative for both FB and the carriers.
- click170 12y agoWhat I find horrifying is that this has a good chance of sucking in enough people so as to set a precedent that it's acceptable, despite the on-going Netflix shenanigans which have been doing a pretty good job of raising awareness for Net Neutrality. I don't think most people understand the connection between the two. "What does having Facebook on my phone for only 12$ have to do with my Netflix being slow at home?"
- EarthLaunch 12y agoThis is another demonstration of why "net neutrality" is morally wrong (and therefore not needed). Think about what a law to stop this service means; a "net neutrality" law. It means forcefully stopping someone from offering this service. And forcefully stopping someone else from buying this service. Both of them want to do it by choice, because it benefits them, in their view. To stop them from doing that, on any non-fundamental basis like an alternate opinion about the value of long term effects, is morally depraved.
- opendais 12y agoNope. It is people like you that are morally wrong in enabling oligopoly power and calling it completely consensual. If you have 4 choices, all of them bad, is that really a consensual transaction? No. It isn't. There is a finite amount of wireless companies capable of operating in a region due to the natural monopoly of the fact two parties interfere with each other when using the same band.
- EarthLaunch 12y agoThere's a clear moral difference between four bad options reached voluntarily, and one good option reached by forcing people. Who really believes that the way to achieve the best outcome, in society, is to forcefully tell people what they have to do? Forcing people to do things against their will can never result in a better outcome than respecting people's rights. And in this age, anyone can educate themselves about why.
- opendais 12y agoAlright. I'll buy up all the land surrounding where you live and deny you access to the world. It'll be purely a voluntary transaction between me, your neighbors, and the city. You weren't consulted but based on your moral belief structure you believe that is acceptable so you shouldn't complain when I wall you in and don't let you leave. No? You don't like that? Well, it was a purely voluntary transaction on par with what you suggested. Natural monopolies exist in the real world. Pretend they don't at your peril.
- amenghra 12y agoToo bad the deal doesn't include Wikipedia :(
- quink 12y agoYour view of the universe is ass backwards. What makes Wikipedia and Facebook and Twitter more worthy than a million other websites that may consume less bandwidth even if you summed them up? Why is Wikipedia more special than Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive? OpenStreetMap? Hudong or Baike? Github? Debian/Ubuntu? Representing Wikipedia as the only free source of all human knowledge is about on the same level as a monopoly on free exchange of ideas. If not today, then at some point, or in some subject areas. It's disgusting. Wikipedia Zero may have good intentions, but in practice it is vile.
- bduerst 12y agoBasically, even by playing favorites you're contributing to the problem. All information should be agnostic with regards to availability - right?
- nickysielicki 12y agoI don't know how anyone can say that net-neutraility does not preclude innovation. What if I was an up and coming social media site? If all the tweens in the world were on this cell plan (which I imagine is a core demographic of this) how in the world would I be able to gain marketshare? It's so damn clear. It's sad that society doesn't care.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago£12 in UK buys 'unlimited' data, unlimited text and 250 minutes (of which I probably use 10)
- dm2 12y agoHas anyone tried using T-Mobile's $10 unlimited data plan + a Google Voice number + RedPhone + TextSecure? Does it work as good as normal phone service? (obviously there are areas of the country where it wouldn't work while traveling, mainly concerned about an area that has good Tmobile coverage.) http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/mobile-internet.html http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/mobile-internet.htm... It would have only 1 GB of 4G, unlimited 3G, but I personally don't use much data anyways, 3 GB would be $10 extra per month. I'd also like to add a VPN to that package, I've used PrivateTunnel in the past, does anyone have a better recommendation for a VPN service? https://www.privatetunnel.com https://www.privatetunnel.com $12 for 50 GB, which would last me a long time on a mobile phone since I use WiFi most of the time. Basically $11 per month for unlimited everything and it would be encrypted through multiple services. Back on topic: I don't see anything wrong with Sprint offering this package. Nobody is forced to purchase it since there is sufficient alternatives from both Sprint and other service providers. I personally wouldn't use it and am not sure what people would do if they needed to Google something, but if people want it, let them buy it. Unrelated again: Why was Twitter (TWTR) up 20% today?
- flyrain 12y agoI don't think it's a good idea. I want more than Facebook and Twitter.
- diminoten 12y agoUnlike home Internet, real competition exists in this space, so something as stupid as this will go away rather quickly unless there's an actual demand for it.
- crazy1van 12y agoI think this is particularly scary to many not because it will be hated by the public, but because it may be embraced by the public.
- hokkos 12y agoIt already exist in France since several years [1] and never had lot of traction. I wouldn't be so afraid has everyone else here. [1] http://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/forfait-m6-mobile http://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/forfait-m6-mobile
- ephemeralgomi 12y agobrb, implementing TCP/IP tunneled over twitter
- iguana 12y agoThis is going to be awesome for cheap "phone home" drone projects. I wonder if the sims would work in a mobile hotspot (and just allow traffic to *.twitter.com) or some other programmatic access. I would pay $12/month for my dronrs to tweet.
- superuser2 12y agoI'm sure the point is for you to "engage with brands" via Twitter. If no human is looking at the ads, Twitter has no reason to subsidize your access.
- noname123 12y agoQuick someone make a web proxy via Facebook/Twitter messenger proxy. Set it up as a SaaS, surf the web with only the Sprint $12 plan and sell as many subscriptions before Sprint notices the unusual pattern in their bandwidth usage!
- malka 12y agooh yes. So much possibilities.
- higherpurpose 12y agoThis is how the Idiocracy future begins, I'm sure of it.
- doctorshady 12y agoI've got to say, I'm a little impressed by the reaction to this. T-Mobile doing the exact same thing, sans Twitter, and eventually with a handful of music streaming services didn't receive nearly as much outrage. Some people were even defending it.
- fred_durst 12y agoSprint isn’t being paid by any of the apps, but Mr. Draper didn’t rule it out in the future. “It’s definitely possible,” he said. “But we have not gone down that path yet.” Sprint is collecting users to be sold to the highest bidder. "Hi Startup, what to be included in our $10 plan? That will cost you X dollars." Goodbye open internet. Never thought it would actually die in my lifetime. They should start calling this movement ISP 2.0 :(
- aikah 12y agoPay to play. That's how it worked in every industry so far,internet was a "freak" that need to be locked up according to some. Unfortunatly this model will be the future of the ISP business...
- mcintyre1994 12y agoIs this going to block adverts? That seems..insane. I mean sure Facebook are doing well with their mobile app ads (I'm guessing you get Google Play or something?) but are they just going to stop people clicking adverts that lead offsite or to an app you're not allowed?
- Smudge 12y agoMy worry isn't that service providers are finding ways to package and sell limited internet access, and that this violates net neutrality. Ideally I wish there were something preventing this, but if you're paying only for Facebook access, you know what you're getting, and it's just not the same as paying for a standard broadband connection. My worry is that, if the majority of consumers start paying to access only the sites they care about, we'll end up in a situation where the Internet looks more like broadcast media than like the world wide web. Imagine if the barrier to entry for creating a website were such that you had to negotiate with content and service providers to get your site featured in the right packages. Looking to start up a new e-commerce site? Get included in Comcast's "shopping channel" package. Want to start a sports commentary blog? Make sure you're in AT&T's "unlimited sports" package or you'll be missing out on your biggest traffic source. My fear is that the majority of consumers won't really notice a difference, at least not right away. They'll be able to get access to all their usual websites, and if it comes at a heavy discount from the full "Internet" package, they won't really get upset if they can't access a particular website. Especially if every service already comes with the top 500-1,000 websites in their language. My mom definitely wouldn't notice any difference, and many of my less techy friends might not either. So if you left it up to the consumer, you might end up right back where you started with pre-packaged TV subscriptions, leaving the majority of the long-tail Internet to stagnate.
- Periodic 12y agoI think you're understating what an impact this would have. What has made the web so amazing is the low cost of reaching users allows entrepreneurs to try new things with lower risk. This has lead to high rates of innovation in the tech sector. This change would stifle innovation by increasing the barriers to entry for new web services. Many of the companies we've grown to love today might not have been able to get started in a world without net neutrality. Your next start-up might not have access to Sprint, or AT&T or Comcast subscribers without paying those carriers.
- erichurkman 12y agoPlus, what about all the services that every major site relies on? Example: Stripe.com, on Alexa's rankings, is #1,331 in the US. Does that mean every site that uses Stripe is broken, even if you pay for access to the main site?
- SolarUpNote 12y agoWhat's to stop them from having "Sprint Business Network". Set up your business website with Sprint hosting to allow the $12/mo members to access your site ... for free!
- dmritard96 12y agoSo what happens with outlinks? My friends post tons of links to FB and twitter, seems like thats really where I derive most of the value from these services...
- tormeh 12y agoThis is it. The "TV channel" Internet we've all been warned about. This probably won't fly with European regulators. I desperately hope.
- ithinkso 12y agoMaybe not so drastically as in US but I think it may also happen. If I recall correctly some T-Mobile plan in Poland has something like 'free Facebook'.
- ranran876 12y agoWell this was more or less inevitable... I think people are in some kind of serious denial about the drastic increase in bandwidth being demanded by customers. I don't think Sprint's solution is healthy for the state of the internet, but I do think something will have to change. I personally don't use any high bandwidth services. I don't watch Netflicks, or a lot of Youtube - and yet I'm stuck with higher and higher internet bills and I have to subsidize other people's use of the internet. Frankly, that's ridiculous. Ultimately I think the system will have to revert to the $/Gb system we used to have. If we all reverted back to that, I think you'd see some very competitive pricing. However the selective traffic stuff.. that's a bit scary. I don't think they should be allowed to look at our traffic in the first place. I understand you need to look at the packets to be able to route them, but anything past that just seems like it should be illegal.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tn13 12y agoIn case of Sprint this might be a very good thing for average society. I will never ever pay $40 for any data plan but I will happily pay $5 for only Google Maps. That way this new innovation will earn sprint and additional $5. Similarly my poor aunt who needs internet only for Facebook might end up saving $35 which can then go for her healthcare. Sprint is clearly addressing a legitimate need in an innovative way and making money in the process. I do not thing this comes under net neutrality issue. The difference between Sprint and Comcast is that Comcast has put cables in cities using public land and has got a virtual monopoly over the markets. They can screw us from front and behind and we have to suffer it silently.
- jldugger 12y agoI think Twitter just found a new paid VPN offering!
- beebs93 12y agoI guess serving up ads, giving away different deals, etc. specific to a user's Internet pipeline (i.e. firehose vs app/site-specific) will be reality as it's just another filter.
- api 12y agoRIP The Open Internet 1993 - 2014
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ivanca 12y agoPlease Please Hacker News... LETS DO THIS: Operation Boycot Sprint ======================= Get yourself and everyone you know out of sprint. Is completly possible to keep your cellphone number so please do it; we must show how serious we are about net neutrality.
- drderidder 12y agoSplinternet. Bad idea. It won't succeed.
- politician 12y agoI think what a lot of people are missing about this deal - net neutrality aside - is how silly it is from an advertising and marketing angle. A significant amount of of Facebook's business model is based on advertising. Now, those links go where? Nowhere? Error pages? All of those funny tweets containing links? Do those timeout? Are the top 500 sites supposed to create closed-loop experiences?
- valdiorn 12y agoAnd when people realize they can't watch any of the funny videos their friends link to, or view the 9gag links they post, or sign the change.org petitions they are hammered with? Not everything you see on facebook is hosted at facebook.com, and people will very quickly realize that.
- collyw 12y agoOut of interest, would it be possible to create a facebook app that acts as a proxy server to the outside for this connection?
- nathan_long 12y agoOh, fantastic. Maybe we can also buy Walmart-sponsored cars that cost $200 and can only drive to and from Walmart.