Wireless phone company monopoly means 7,314% mark-ups.

Data should be data to a phone company, right?   No, no.  Not when there’s big money to be squeezed out of consumers.  Therefore, the data the phone companies transfer as text massages will cost you 7314% as much as data sold to you when you transfer data through your phone operating as a modem.

Having the functional equivalent of one big wireless phone company, which is where we’re headed, is like living in a communist country.  The gouging consumers take in the markup of texting is proof.   The other proof is that the FCC in the process trashing net neutrality in the wire markets.    If our politicians weren’t functional psychotics, they would clean up this mess in a week by breaking up the phone companies so that we had real competition, and then, for good measure, passing a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and forbidding corporations from playing any part in the electoral process.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Ben
    Ben June 28, 2011 Reply

    Text massages, why didn't I think of it first?

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth August 24, 2011 Reply

    10 million percent texting mark-up not enough for AT&T. This, from Free Press:

    On Thursday, AT&T confirmed it would no longer offer 1,000 text messages for $10 per month, leaving customers to choose between paying 20 cents per message or $20 per month for unlimited texts. This is the second time this year the company has eliminated lower-cost options, having removed the $5-for-200 text plan in January.

    AT&T calls the elimination of a lower-priced option a move to “streamline” its offerings, but it’s really a price hike in sheep’s clothing. This unilateral move to gouge customers, by raising prices on a service where it earns a nearly 100-percent profit margin, calls into question AT&T’s claims that the wireless market is perfectly competitive. In a truly competitive market, no carrier could get away with raising prices on a service where it already charges a 10-million-percent markup.

    http://www.freepress.net/press-release/2011/8/19/att-texting-price-hike-shows-danger-no-wireless-competition

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