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People Aren't Buying AT&T's New Troll Toll Proposal
Consumer Groups Urge FCC to Investigate

Yesterday we noted how AT&T was back with yet another controversial pricing idea: charging app and content developers a fee so that their content didn't impact a user's cap. In pitching it to their friends at the Journal, AT&T did their best to dress this up as a high-value proposition for the consumer, insisting this would be like a "1-800 number" or "freight included" for apps. As we noted however, if you've watched AT&T operate at all, you realized this was simply some new makeup on an old AT&T pig: namely AT&T's effort to unnaturally impose their will on the wireless ecosystem and levy totally unnecessary additional network usage tolls.

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Some in the press didn't quite understand the potential pitfalls of AT&T's latest idea. We saw one outlet insist that this idea means that AT&T would "essentially be providing data free of charge to its customers." In reality what it means is you pay the same and app developers pay more to get a preferred status from AT&T, a cost passed on to you the consumer.

A few bloggers and reporters understood this, such as GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham, Techcrunch's Jordan Cook and Time's Sam Gustin. Harold Feld over at Public Knowledge was one of the few to clearly break down what AT&T's really attempting here:

quote:
1. Create an artificial scarcity with an arbitrary bandwidth cap for its wireless services;

2. Charge users who exceed this arbitrary bandwidth cap;

3. Claim to do consumers a favor by letting the ap developer pay for exceeding the arbitrary bandwidth cap.
Feld goes on to note how these kinds of schemes actually create a disincentive to invest in the network, and puts AT&T in an artificial position of power determining content winners and losers. Feld and his group are urging the FCC to take a closer look at AT&T's scheme. That's unlikely to happen, since the FCC has never really taken an interest in stopping sophisticated nickel and diming (look at below the line "unfees" as a shining example), and generally pretends these kinds of plans are simply "creative pricing."