Apathy of our Generation: Wireless Companies and their “Justified” Greed
Honestly, this has just gotten sickening. The apathy of the masses about the despicable actions of the corporations that “sell” us services involving cable/wireless/data services has gotten way out of hand. I’ve had a problem with cell phone carriers in the US for such a long time though. There is no reason to charge for texting, if there is any charge, it should not be $20+ a month to send a few kb of data. On top of this, if one has a dataplan, they should not require a texting plan as well because the text messages are sent as data the same way that the internet is accessed.
Yet, people try to defend the corporations that do this. They state that these businesses are just here to make money. Which is true, it does not justify extortion prices to the point of absolute “Either pay this amount of don’t use this service from anyone”. The wireless carriers in America are in such a state that it is an oligopoly. They then continue to push this fear agenda of being against government interference within the business, but this is probably the only situation where I would disagree. However, I am bad at putting my frustration into words when I am blogging, I can only seem to talk about these subjects well when I am just casually talking about them and not when I want to actually publish it. So I am going to quote one of my good friends when we were discussing the subject online.
yes, the free market does eliminate inefficiencies which can prevent regulation. However, telecoms in the US have local monopolies on broadband, and in many cases, this is even legislated. This is a result of high barriers of entry in the telecommunications industry and some intense lobbying.
A solution that would require much less regulation but enable an open market to fix these issues would be forcing telecoms to share their lines at reasonable rates, reducing the barriers of entry, increasing competitors, thus competition. With this solution, customers could choose the ISP that enforces net neutrality, or unlimited bandwidth. Right now, telecoms can do whatever the fuck they want because there is no customer choice.
This situation got even worse with the recent Meredith Attwell Baker incident (http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/05/11/meredith.baker.to.lobby.for.comcast.nbc/). Basically she approved something that helped companies like comcast fuck over their customers even more and then left her job at the FCC to go work for these exact corporations.
Now I’ve just angered myself into the point of not ranting anymore, so I will just leave it at this and that I hate the route America is being run. It is not the voice of the people, it is the voice of the corporations who then buy the voices of the lobbyists who then pass more legislation to bend you further and further. Makes me sick.