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AT&T exempts HBO Max from data caps but still limits your Netflix use;:
AT&T's new HBO Max streaming service is exempt from the carrier's mobile data caps, even though competing services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ count against the monthly data limits. This news was reported today in an article by The Verge, which said that AT&T "confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company's traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans."
The traditional data caps limit customers to a certain amount of data each month before they have to pay overage fees or face extreme slowdowns for the rest of the month. "Soft data caps on unlimited plans" apparently is a reference to the 22GB or 50GB thresholds, after which unlimited-data users may be prioritized below other users when connecting to a congested cell tower.
"According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T's 'sponsored data' system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps," The Verge wrote. "But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it's just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Saturday June 06 2020, @07:25PM (7 children)
I'd rather cancel AT&T... oh wait...then I won't have internet. Now what?
Where is the demand for an open market?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @07:43PM
Good news, comrade. SoylentNews is starting SoylentGulch, a Libertarian commune for all your open market needs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @07:44PM (5 children)
The government is too busy going after the good guys (Amazon and Google). What the bad guys are doing (ISPs and cable companies) is exactly the intended effect. They want to turn search and online product purchasing into the same dystopia that they turned cable and medicine/pharmaceutics, IP, casinos and gambling arenas (through limiting competition), and the taxi cab industry (through medallions. Before Uber/Lyft) into.
Let's not forget the fact that the USPS has a monopoly on what should be your mailbox but that just isn't enough. No, delivery services need more regulations to hurt consumers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @07:54PM
You forget the United States government has a monopoly on what should be your money. Why do you accept payment in US dollars when you should be using Galt dollars instead? Why do accept taxation when you should be persuaded voluntarily to donate as much of as little of your Galt dollars as you want to support SoylentNews?
Why don't you lynch Chinese people for spreading COVID-19 and lynch Black people for looting your precious businesses?
Where's your God-given freedom to lynch every ethnic group you hate?
Who is John Galt??
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday June 06 2020, @08:00PM
There are no good guys among large businesses. There are companies with better marketing drivel that convinces rubes that they're the good guys, but they're pretty universally run by scum and do scummy things.
Amazon recently had no problem exposing its near-minimum-wage warehouse work force to Covid-19, giving a bunch of them lifelong disabilities and killing a few employees and their families. And while that might make sense for making sure people have stuff they need to survive, it makes no sense for distributing non-essentials, a.k.a. the vast majority of what Amazon sells.
And as for Google, they're in the business of spying as thoroughly as they possibly can on everybody who uses the Internet. And "everybody" includes you, even if you don't use Google for anything, because they'll track by IP address, work around various blocking tools, and operate on a lot of sites other than their own. And they will gladly share the results of that spying with authoritarian governments and authoritarian organizations within allegedly democratic governments for the right price.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @02:17PM (2 children)
> USPS has a monopoly
Isn't the Post Office defined in the USA Constitution. Not a monopoly, a government function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @04:31PM
It is a monopoly. No one else can deliver anything to what should be my mailbox. That's a monopoly.
and in countries where such monopolies were removed the doomsday scenarios that everyone screamed about never happened.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @04:33PM
"Isn't the Post Office defined in the USA Constitution."
I don't mind the government keeping the USPS if they want. I want them to remove the mailbox monopoly.