Linked: AT&T’s HBO Max Deal Was Never Free
The EFF looks at the AT&T offer of free data to watch HBO Max, and how California’s net-neutrality law forced it to go away. Obviously, AT&T would like you to take the simple explanation and not ask any questions. According to them, of course, the law punished their users by taking away their all-you-can eat HBO Max viewing over mobile data. What they don’t want you to know?
“A comprehensive study by Epicenter.works showed that after zero rating was banned in the EU, consumers received cheaper mobile data over the years. This is because if the ISP can not do things like drive users towards its verticals through artificial scarcity schemes like data caps, it will need to raise its caps and be less willing to penalize usage of its network simply for using the service they purchased in order to appeal to customers. In fact, the infrastructure being laid out for modern wireless, fiber optics, has so much capacity that data caps really make no sense if the market was more competitive.”
See, the question that should be asked is how AT&T can afford to give users all the video streaming they want over their network for HBO Max, but forces caps on all of its users for their internet usage.
Clearly, their network can handle the traffic of unlimited video streaming, so why do we let them use these excuses to limit access to the internet?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/atts-hbo-max-deal-was-never-free
