Sure - you'll get video streaming from content providers who are able to pay large sums of money without hitting against the artificial caps currently in place.
Of course, that also means it'll kill any competitors not willing or able to pay the same extortion, so in the end you'll have less choice, but at least you'll have saved money. Except you won't really save money because once the current administration allows further consolidation in the wireless sector, prices will rise with authority.
> Of course, that also means it'll kill any competitors not willing or able to pay the same extortion, so in the end you'll have less choice, but at least you'll have saved money.
You might save a few bucks in the short run, but lack of competition doesn't tend to be good for markets - especially ones which can rapidly change like online services. Less choice generally means you're paying more.
They get things like the Binge On program T-Mobile did. Which was really not beneificial to consumers either, but consumers can perceive it as such - ie, T-Mobile knew they had revenues in excess of the cost of subsidizing favored video and music streaming services, so they made them not count for the data cap they put on their customers. They spin the story to be their great charity in giving away all this data, when the reality was the cost of operating their network was sufficiently low enough they could be providing unlimited bandwidth (or just substantially higher caps) while still profiting, but would rather have the best of both worlds where large media consumers use their platform for the cherry picked unlimited while still exploiting their customer base on every other network attached service they use.
Naturally, ISPs (if they care enough to do so) can spin their money grabs as giving away popular services for free (often after said services paid them off) while simultaneously limiting data or bandwidth for everything else.
Anything but the dumb pipe ethernet grid is a money grab. Hell, fixed data speeds we have now are money grabs. The reality is that there is a variable amount of bandwidth in a given network, and if ISPs were not exploitative they would guarantee a minimum speed but allow users to saturate the network as much as they can, because that is how the reality of the network operates. As it is, you get somewhere between 0 and your cap speed and are artificially throttled at the cap through anti-consumer behavior they can get away with because there is no competition in infrastructure.
"You wont have the government standing between you and your internet!" is the response I've seen around. I'd really love to see if there was any legit defense of this action though...
They get submarined costs from both their ISP and any services that come over the network with no market visibility or competitiveness to allow customers to switch away from bad product mixes.
Of course, that also means it'll kill any competitors not willing or able to pay the same extortion, so in the end you'll have less choice, but at least you'll have saved money. Except you won't really save money because once the current administration allows further consolidation in the wireless sector, prices will rise with authority.