AT&T came under a bit of fire earlier this month when they announced a change to their terms of service which banned, among other things, “customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device.” This is a roundabout way of saying “no Slingbox. They’re also trying to keep control of their voice network, as the recently-released Skype application for the iPhone will only work on Wi-Fi, not the AT&T 3G network. Thankfully, they’ve retracted the former offender, but it still might not be enough.
The reasons for AT&T’s recent restrictions are abundantly clear: they want to maintain full control over what users can do on their network. In banning Slingbox and similar services, AT&T is trying to keep people buying their mobile TV service. If people have Slingboxes there is no need to buy mobile TV, so AT&T is trying to force people to use their expensive solutions, rather than alternative ones which don’t cost money.
Likewise, AT&T doesn’t want users on Skype, since it cuts into their voice revenue. They want control over how users make calls, and allowing them to do so on Skype would undercut their business model. Of course, they claim that network capacity is at issue, and it very well may be. Yet if it is, it’s not nearly as high a priority as maintaining control over user activity. At best, it makes a convenient excuse.
Thankfully, AT&T retracted part of their TOS change, namely the part about Slingbox. They claim that the TOS change was “done in error,” but that seems like a specious claim. It’s likely that the combination of complaining users and especially those who want to escape their contract ETF-free caused the change-back. We’ll never know for sure, of course, because AT&T wouldn’t release that information. Yet this seems like reasonable speculation.
The issue of wireless net neutrality is one we’re going to see a lot in the near future. Operators, armed with a powerful lobby, will oppose any change to their stranglehold over user activity on the networks they built. Consumers, armed with the power of numbers, will plead their case, demonstrating that wireless Internet is still Internet, thus should be governed by the same rules. The impending decision could change the Internet as we know it.
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