We know the feeling

Disclosure: I work for Wallace Murry, a phone company by always-available people who can teach you how to use your technology in your home.

The FCC voted to repeal net neutrality on December 14th. Confusing and controversial, net neutrality is a complicated idea describing how traffic should flow on the Internet.

To use a common analogy, we pay for our household electricity today in a “neutral” fashion: the electricity for my computer costs the same as for my stove. My electricity provider doesn’t care, or know, how I use the electricity I buy. A “non-neutral” electricity bill would could charge me more for my stove than my computer. Eliminating net neutrality could lead to Facebook costing more than Netflix on my monthly internet bill. Verizon could charge me more for Google.com and drive my search traffic to Verizon-owned Yahoo.com instead. See Burger King explain net neutrality using whoppers here.

Digital Trends labelled the elimination of Obama-era net neutrality as “dismantling the Internet.” Accurate characterization or not, it’s seems odd that a not well understood proposal is the spark to get us talking about consumer injustice perpetrated by telecom companies. Is it really here that we choose to hang our hat and challenge their oligopoly power? Have we really become this accustomed to their pervasively awful behavior that it takes a buzzword?

Net neutrality is just the beginning, folks. And to defend net neutrality without any discussion of telecom companies’ systemic abuse of power is to make this a single-issue debate. It’s not.

Let’s start with the most basic issue: selecting phone plans. We don’t really know how much data we need, so we rely on company marketing or friends to guide us. And instead of being taught about gigabytes, we are sold a lot more than we need.

So for those of us fat and full on the “all you can eat” phone plans, have you ever stopped to consider if you really need unlimited data? Buried on Verizon’s site is a 2013 article where they admit that the average person uses less than one gigabyte (roughly downloading 280 3-minute songs on iTunes). In the next sentence they conclude “Your smartphone and tablet activity can be limitless, but it turns out that you probably don’t actually need unlimited data”.

Today, the average Verizon customer uses 2.3 gigabytes per month. So despite the sleek ads for unlimited data, or the reps high on commission, chances are you don’t need all you can eat. A 3gb plan, or 1gb plan if you’re over 65 according to Nielsen, will make you just as fat and full. Don’t be taken advantage of for lacking this hidden knowledge.

Let’s talk about cost of phone plans. Today, the most subscribed network in the U.S., Verizon, charges $60 for 10 gigabytes of data, while the most subscribed network in the U.K., EE, charges only $35 for 16 gigabytes of data. Some sort of Imperial rule half-off coupon? No. They have legitimate competition while our two largest operators, AT&T and Verizon, have more than two thirds of us. And don’t be fooled by the appearance of competition here. Cricket Wireless is owned by AT&T, MetroPCS is a T-Mobile company, and Boost Mobile is owned by Sprint.

Companies like Tracfone offer $19.99 for 60 minutes of talk each month. But what does this plan really cost per gigabyte? In most cases, an hour of conversation will use 0.0576 gigabytes. So that plan charges more than $347 per gigabyte plus tax. And 10 cents a text message? Well, that’s $655,000 per gigabyte. Texts, calls, radio, and T.V. are all megabytes and gigabytes.

And what about their famously stellar customer support? When I tried to reach a human for help with my new plan, a robot female voice tried to sell me an iPhone X three times in ten minutes. I never reached a human operator.

As a final insult to injury, phone companies sell our private data to advertisers. The data we supposedly bought! In fact, an engineer in San Francisco recently discovered that AT&T was selling subscriber names and their real-time-of-day locations to businesses for the purpose of better promoting ads for nearby services.

I’m all for debating the implications of the December 14th vote. But can we please look at the bigger picture? Unlike net neutrality, these problems aren’t hard to understand. Telecom companies today don’t care about basic human privacy. They are happy to sell us additional services we don’t need, especially when we’re vulnerable and asking them for help.

These companies work for us. We need them to understand that, or we need to start some that will.

Originally published on Circumscribing