Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC

It has been only a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband knowledge caps, and the docket is filling up with feedback from customers who say they should not must pay overage prices for utilizing their Web service. The docket has about 190 feedback thus far, practically all from particular person broadband prospects.

Federal Communications Fee dockets are often populated with filings from telecom corporations, advocacy teams, and different organizations, however some entice feedback from particular person customers of telecom companies. The information cap docket in all probability will not break any information on condition that the FCC has fielded many millions of feedback on internet neutrality, but it surely presently tops the company’s list of most active proceedings primarily based on the variety of filings up to now 30 days.

“Information caps, particularly by suppliers in markets with no competitors, are nothing greater than an arbitrary cash seize by grasping companies. They restrict and stifle innovation, trigger undue stress, and are pointless,” wrote Lucas Landreth.

“Information caps are as outmoded as lengthy distance phone charges,” wrote Joseph Wilkicki. “At each flip, telecommunications corporations search to extract extra income from prospects for a service that has quickly grow to be important to trendy life.” Pointing to taxpayer subsidies offered to ISPs, Wilkicki wrote that enormous telecoms “have sought each alternative to take these funds and never present the anticipated broadband rollout that we paid for.”

Republican’s espresso refill analogy attracts mockery

Any try and restrict or ban knowledge caps will draw robust opposition from FCC Republicans and Web suppliers. Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington final week argued that regulating knowledge caps can be akin to mandating free espresso refills:

Suppose we have been a special FCC, the Federal Espresso Fee, and relatively than regulating the worth of espresso (which we’ve got vowed to not do), we as a substitute implement a regulation whereby shoppers are entitled to free refills on their coffees. What results may observe? Properly, I predict three issues might occur: both cafés cease serving small coffees, or cafés cost much more for small coffees, or cafés cost slightly extra for all coffees.

Simington’s espresso analogy was mocked in a comment signed with the names “Jonathan Mnemonic” and James Carter. “Espresso is just not, in actual fact, Web service,” the remark stated. “Cafés should not capable of abuse monopolistic practices primarily based on infrastructural strangleholds. To briefly put aside the niceties: the analogy is absurd, and it’s borderline offensive to the discerning layperson.”