This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
We really need to mandate serious fines for companies that violate trust regulations, like 20% of the estimated annual profits (based on the previous five years) or 5% of the company's valuation. You know, the way a traffic ticket is about a week's pay.
If their contempt of law is recurring or particularly egregious, nationalize the fucker.
Ceo's in orange jumpsuits.
Companies should just be charged the fine multiplied by the number of offenses (like any individual being charged), then multiplied by the number of employees. Any amount over their available cash, becomes asset seizure (for "too critical to fail" companies) or make them go through bankruptcy to liquidate. Hell, you can even be nice and let them do a "payment plan" over a year or two, seizing all profit until the fine is paid in full. I bet companies would follow laws remarkably well if that were on the line.
The US would just be a couple Facebook privacy violations away from running a governmental surplus for the first time in decades!
It's crazy that this isn't being properly implemented (probably easier to say and talk about, but stil) because really hefty fines are the only way to stop companies from bullshitting their literal customers.
If there is one thing we know, than it is that companies will not stop at hurting people, the environment or fucking over their customers if it means they make a good profit off of it and can get away with it. It's literally a simple calculation for them, nothing more. Literally kill an entire ecosystem and risk poisoning tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of humans? No problem, as long as it pays off.
It cannot be a fixed ceiling - fixed floor, sure - but ceiling should be a percentage of market cap. It’s their responsibility to maximize shareholder profits - making it no longer in the best interest of the shareholders if they had to sell more shares to raise money to pay fines and dilute shareholder value
US is a weird country.
I live in EU, and I haven't even heard of bandwidth quotas on home fiber. Cheap mobile subscriptions have some, though. But mostly it's just no limit.
It used to be that way in the U.S. but Americans love companies extracting rent at the same time the public is subsidising them.
Americans are ignorant and utterly obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism
You mean data quotas, bandwidth is what is capped.
This is one reason why privacy is important, companies knowing your info directly impacts your wallet.
This particular one has nothing to do with privacy. They have to offer a specific type of plan by law, they nerfed that plan.
Which is not to say corporations knowing everything about you is good in any way, but this is simply a different issue (with corporations)
Municipal Broadband would be nice to have.
Reminder that net neutrality is dead. I use a VPN because otherwise my ISP decides on my behalf when I've had enough 1080p YouTube and slows down specifically that connection
Wait, you can get around T-Mobile's YouTube throttling with a VPN? 50GB is a pittance; I am beyond done with having to switch to 480p after I use it all up in a day. Most games are 100+ GB these days and a Blu Ray REMUX can easily top 70GB, so it's stupid easy to tear though 50GB simply by downloading one single game or movie. Unlimited should mean unlimited.
So they broke the law, so somebody there who signed off on this will be going to jail, right?
Right?
From the linked press release:
Governor Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced an agreement with T-Mobile USA, Inc. (T-Mobile), requiring the company to improve and expand the home internet service it offers eligible New Yorkers under the New York Affordable Broadband Act (ABA).
As a result of OAG’s investigation, T-Mobile will remove the data caps associated with its ABA plans and deliver 25 Mbps download speeds to all ABA plan subscribers, unless network congestion requires temporary reductions. In addition, T-Mobile will offer ABA plans in all areas where it provides home internet service and make its ABA plan webpage discoverable by search engines.
WHERE'S THE MOTHERFUCKING PUNISHMENT?! All I see is where they're making T-mobile pinky-promise to start following the law they've been breaking all this time, while being allowed to keep every single goddamn penny of their ill-gotten gains!
NO mention of prison time for executives.
NO mention of punitive fines.
NO mention even of restitution to wronged customers, which is less than the bare fucking minimum!!!
The only even slightly useful part of that press release is this at the bottom, because every New Yorker should be absolutely livid about this weak-ass corporatist shit:
Contact the Governor’s Press Office
Contact us by phone:
Albany: (518) 474-8418
New York City: (212) 681-4640
Contact us by email:
Press.Office@exec.ny.gov
This is exactly why I refuse to even consider those silly hot spot cellular based services for your home. They spend decades capping and throttling that shit. There is no trust there.
I tried to use one for a month when I cancelled Comcast. They’re garbage. For home internet, you need it to always work. Having no internet is unacceptable, especially if you work from home. Well, the cellular hotspot services go back and forth between having signal and not having signal, so the internet is routinely not working.
Calling it affordable broadband while throttling people to 600 Kbps after 50 GB is like selling a discounted bus pass that turns into a pair of shoes after four rides. And hiding the plan from search engines? Apparently the cheapest way to provide low income internet is making sure nobody can find it.
ISPs doing dirty tactics, what else is new?
The same companies who display in the open "up to" on all of their plans. Their speeds are never guaranteed.
50 GB? That’s a couple iOS or other OS update, or just streaming video a lot. A quick check shows my house over 500GB last month.
what's funny is all these internet companies can just give everyone affordable high speed and still make a profit
Artificial static throughput caps on modern networks are asinine and archaic, especially on shared mediums.
Network providers should permit shared best effort throughput, with a sliding temporal window which keeps a tally of usage and feeds into a ratcheting deprioritisation of slot allocations. This would permit short bursts of maximum throughput, which is more efficient and frees the channel quicker, and slots longer transfers into the remaining default channel space.
Differentiate service based on the dimensions of the monitored and enforced windows, not an arbitrary static sphincter.
Yeah but how are we going to exploit the poors with a system that works?
greedy mf's, they don't give a shit about their customers
In my country it is a normal practice that internet providers start fucking your connection up so you move to a different plan. Faking that the connection is failing, limiting downstream...
bigger they get, shadier they deal
