> 16. Termination of Investigation. In express reliance on the covenants and representations in this Consent Decree and to avoid further expenditure of public resources, the Bureau agrees to terminate the Investigation. In consideration for the termination of the Investigation, Verizon Wireless agrees to the terms, conditions, and procedures contained herein.
Verizon has agreed to pay $1.35M and will likely notify the FTC by mail if it makes a change. It has agreed to abide by the law. If you put this in perspective, this is way more than a slap on the wrist. If we assume a gb costs ~$10 and an average user uses ~6gb then:
($1,350,000 fine / $10/gb) / (6gb/user * 12months) = 1875
This is almost very nearly 1900 people! A huge number. Obviously this is back of a napkin, and the actual size of headers is pretty negligible so there isn't any sense in backing that out of the calculation, because the users already paid for the bandwith.
Plus, verizon is literally the only company out of hundreds of providers doing this. Surely between the weight of this fine and the competition the company will go bankrupt soon.
Big win! Say what you want about the FTC but they closed down the investigation saving an untold number to the US tax payer, Verizon is forced to break the bank, and the response time was rapid, 4 years open shut.
The FTC has been super sharp on policing the industry, by allowing the Governement to subsidize huge swathes of infrastructure costs and selling a finite amount of bandwith, they have been able to keep companies on their toes, not allowing any one company to own telephone, wireless, and internet capabilities.
I hope they can keep this up because Verizon is the only bad actor in the entire space, so it is pretty much all taken care of now.
There is a thing in the world called "petty injustice". It's when you get screwed a little bit. Entities like Verizon make a great deal of money on aggregate petty injustice. There is no legal recourse: things like this FTC investigation are (as you intimate) like the buzzing of a fly. A minor cost center (mostly legal fees). And even those minor bites are used to attack regulation as "bad for business". Class-action lawsuits are forbidden by virtually all contracts. The only real recourse is to switch carriers; however even that is not real because they all play by the same rules.
Computers are really the thing that make aggregate petty injustice a workable business model, because doing any computation millions of times with humans would cost far too much. This is one reason why dealing with the problem is actually a hacker/programmer moral imperative.
The last piece of the puzzle is why the FTC, SEC, etc. are so ineffective. These are the police of big business. Why are the police of individuals so harsh and powerful, but the police of business so weak and ineffective? I think it has to do with the politics of ignorance. There is no political pressure on the FTC to do it's job; it's too far removed from any elected official. No-one is going to pick the next president based on who they appoint as FTC chairman. One of the reasons is that the country is divided on regulation itself, which means that a large fraction of people, even the victims of petty injustice, would prefer that Verizon simply get away with it. These are the same people who would interpret a harsher penalty as an "anti-business" Obama/Democrat move, instead of simple enforcement of the law.
It's the 21st century and I think it's time that we enumerated some new rights in the face of unprecedented assaults on our freedoms. There needs to be the equivalent of a "fiduciary responsibility" for communications companies. People should not be allowed to give away their legal rights (the right to file class-action lawsuits). The justice system needs to be reformed, with technology and simplifying policies, to make it much faster and much much cheaper. (Not quite related to this case, but our personal devices that represent a very real extension of our minds should be absolutely protected from intrusion.)
> There is a thing in the world called "petty injustice". It's when you get screwed a little bit. Entities like Verizon make a great deal of money on aggregate petty injustice.
That's a very succinct and clear way of putting it. I wonder if there is an essay or other origin for the particular term you are using?
"Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War" (1989) links "petty injustice" to "chickenshit behavior" - "the petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."
>The only real recourse is to switch carriers; however even that is not real because they all play by the same rules.
The only recourse available within the given legal system. It is the legal system which limits our recourse against aggregated petty injustice, and so if people cared enough, the system could be changed or bypassed. The bigger problem is people just don't care about the many small problems... they really don't care about most big problems either. Some days I look at the apathy and wonder if I should just sign up alongside the likes of Verizon and try to profit off the apathy.
I am encouraging everyone to vote throughout 2016. For approximately $605.7142 per person we could buy verizon, and likely gain a controlling interest with limited participation. Voting is super important part of being American, or in a country that allows citizens to excerise this right, there is really only 1 day out of every 4 years I don't vote.
Also uncompensated are the owners of servers that had to spend a little bit more bandwidth on the billions of HTTP requests that got this header tacked on. For someone that has lots of small requests from mobile devices, say for HTTP server push, this is not a small number. When I first went looking for these on my servers, they were in 10% of requests.
Verizon took a pretty big gamble in 2015[0] and bought spectrum covering more than half of America. So even though taxpayers pay for a lot of the infrastructure so they can be a common carrier and deliver services without manipulation, it was pretty risky to assume most of the populated regions in America will use cellphones in 2016.
Since they broke that agreement, they had to pay. 10b is a big risk to take, and 1.3M is likely to panic the market. So while I am happy to see them go bankrupt, I could only imageine the chaos that would ensue if taxpayers had to try and resell that to someone.
If you asked those 190million people whether they would rather have $60 to sell the bandwith or have the country pay to build them an entire wireless network, legislate on their behalf, and limit most of their future profits tax burden, while allowing them to make a profit, and then inject and sell adverts, no brainer, $60 up front.
They are just a Unicorn company anyway, lets see if selling a core service you got for free into an impenatrable market is a good business. Can't wait to see these guys on http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
> 16. Termination of Investigation. In express reliance on the covenants and representations in this Consent Decree and to avoid further expenditure of public resources, the Bureau agrees to terminate the Investigation. In consideration for the termination of the Investigation, Verizon Wireless agrees to the terms, conditions, and procedures contained herein.
Verizon has agreed to pay $1.35M and will likely notify the FTC by mail if it makes a change. It has agreed to abide by the law. If you put this in perspective, this is way more than a slap on the wrist. If we assume a gb costs ~$10 and an average user uses ~6gb then:
($1,350,000 fine / $10/gb) / (6gb/user * 12months) = 1875
This is almost very nearly 1900 people! A huge number. Obviously this is back of a napkin, and the actual size of headers is pretty negligible so there isn't any sense in backing that out of the calculation, because the users already paid for the bandwith.
Plus, verizon is literally the only company out of hundreds of providers doing this. Surely between the weight of this fine and the competition the company will go bankrupt soon.
Big win! Say what you want about the FTC but they closed down the investigation saving an untold number to the US tax payer, Verizon is forced to break the bank, and the response time was rapid, 4 years open shut.
The FTC has been super sharp on policing the industry, by allowing the Governement to subsidize huge swathes of infrastructure costs and selling a finite amount of bandwith, they have been able to keep companies on their toes, not allowing any one company to own telephone, wireless, and internet capabilities.
I hope they can keep this up because Verizon is the only bad actor in the entire space, so it is pretty much all taken care of now.