And yet I am pretty sure that in Germany at least, that plan would not be allowed to be called "Unlimited", no matter how fine the fine print ends up being.
I miss those consumer protections a lot since I moved to the US. It sometimes may seem to get a little bit silly (I'm not totally sure, but I think you are not even allowed to say e.g. "the best pizza" in advertising, because how would you prove that claim), but I easily prefer a little silliness over the deliberately misleading claims here.
Yep, if you use the word unlimited, and that's not what you're actually providing, you're a liar. Pure and simple.
If this is common practice, then these companies are all a bunch of liars.
As opposed to other places in the world, truth in advertising is dead in the US - and also Australia, for that matter.
Try using the word "free" in Norway if you're not prepared to offer that for free with zero strings attached, and see how far you get before feeling the weight of the law. (And "zero strings" here means exactly that in the most literal sense).
I studied marketing law in Norway as part of marketing science before switching back to tech and then moving down under; Australian marketing law is very very relaxed compared to Norway.
Really can you give examples? To give recent general advertising law examples about how strict the standards bureau is, in Australia it’s illegal to show a woman doing most of the housework, or a man being a bad father.
> ”Gratis”, ”vederlagsfritt”, ”uten betaling” og lignende uttrykk må ikke benyttes i markedsføringen dersom gratisytelsen er betinget av kjøp av andre ytelser for å oppnå gratisytelsen.
translates more or less directly (using Google translate and then adjusting slightly based on my 15+ years of experience with talking and writing mostly Norwegian) to
5.3 "Free" Claims
"Free", "Free of charge," "Unpaid," and similar terms, may not be used in the promotion if the free good or service is conditional upon purchase of other benefits to achieve the free good or service.
Sorry they referenced marketing laws generally, consumer protection is covered by a thing called “Australian Consumer Law” and it’s very hostile towards warranties etc.
Both of which might be overregulation, but neither of which are relevant to the kind of laws being discussed here.
As an Australian, I have no idea how lax or strong the consumer protection laws are. I know they exist, and they are enforced by an identifiable, respected federal agency.
I have no idea whether the laws are good, or whether that
agency does a good job in general. In fact, I have very little notion of what I should expect from good laws and enforcement in this field.
This is changing rapidly the last decade or so, especially in the telecom industry. There's quite a few companies getting into trouble for misleading advertising recently.
Some weeks ago there was this article on the HN frontpage (even though it wasn't about tech at all) about a scam that pretended to offer chance to win a car, except it was really a trick to pull people into some crazy completely unrelated money-sucking scheme, and the kicker was that nobody ever won a car, not even the car that was literally on display as being the prize!
And this is apparently legal in the US.
Similarly about the "House of God / 50 dollars or more" TV preachers that promise miracles if you send them money. Taking advantage, mainly of the vulnerable, who believe that, or even just believe they're supporting a proper Christian Church. But it's really just some person telling them to send them money. How the hell is this not regulated?
Is anyone surprised that if you don't have regulations to stop people from scamming others, you can't rely on a vague sense of common decency, because there are enough of them that will exploit it unless you tie their hands and speak out as a society that that sort of shit is simply not acceptable.
> And "zero strings" here means exactly that in the most literal sense
Well, hopefully not in the _most_ literal sense, because Verizon can probably manage to provide you internet service with no actual balls of yarn tied to the router... :)
> Yep, if you use the word unlimited, and that's not what you're actually providing, you're a liar. Pure and simple.
Then by definition nothing is unlimited... The whole universe has limits... there's a finite amount of atoms... even saying you have unlimited access to my comment would be lying because one day, you'll die, or the storage will die, or this comment will be forgotten...
I think if you sell an unlimited 200 Kbps connection, it's implied that it's a 65 GB one. Putting a limit on the bandwidth would be to offer LESS than what the other limits imply.
Saying unlimited 100 mbit/s but throttling it at 1 mbit/s sure, that is clearly false advertising because you actually get unlimited 1 mbit/s.
If nothing is unlimited, then you should not advertise as such. Not sure why you're even bringing that up except to be pedantic.
Pretty clear statement - unlimited data is either unlimited or not. Throttling customers because they reached the limit on what you're selling as "unlimited" is deceptive at best, and actually harmful at worst. We're seeing the latter here, and still people want to correct the customer on what unlimited means.
Simply put: this marketing tactic is a Bad Thing because it sells people something they didn't want with a sticker that said it was what they wanted.
Is it silly? If I claim my pizza is the best, and I never even ran it in a competition, aren't I just lying? I could say that my internet service is the best when someone provides actual unlimited data in the same area and it's the same thing.
I would heavily prefer a country that actually had rule of law and didn't let companies just lie to consumers without consequence. The more this sort of thing goes on in America, the more people will disregard any semblance of law
If I claim my pizza is the best, and I never even ran it in a competition, aren't I just lying?
A (fairly mediocre) hamburger place back where I grew up heavily advertised themselves as "The award winning best burgers in town", reference (in tiny print) a test the local newspaper had done over 10 years ago. So basically it shouldn't be too hard to claim that your X is 'the best' according to some measure without having to outright lie.
In the US some phrases like Best are considered devoid of meaning. The issue is you can develop an arbitrary scale defining Best such as closest to our restaurant or whatever.
I have 1Gbps (125MB) unlimited. I've never had any throttle. And down service is like max. 5 hours per year. Sometime I just put 100GB worth of torrents in queue, go eat lunch in kitchen and comeback and they are all finished. Welcome To Romania where unlimited is the norm here. Oh, and costs ~$15/month
But when you're not throttled at the start of the month and you are after reaching a certain amount of data usage (dare I say, a limit) then it is not unlimited.
It's important to keep in mind that most people never know what other systems are like and so don't know what they're missing when they're missing it. I similarly reflect positively on the stunning relative clarity of freemobile in France selling 50GB high speed plans with free international data roaming for like 20 Euros per month. And now it's 100GB for the same. In the US for that price Verizon won't even spit on you.
The difference between Free's website and Verizon's is huge. On Free's website the details are front and center, bold, prominent. 100GB is right there. The plan details also give you a lot more for a lot less money, but that's a whole other can of bits.
True, but the website is very clear that the unlimited refers to voice and text and only 100gb is included. It's still shifty but way better than what the article is about.
No, actually they say "4G+ illimitée abonnés Freebox" and as they explain in the "en savoir plus" link, the limit applies to people who do not sign up to the Freebox plan (for home Internet).
Having just used it, it’s good but not great if travelling about. This mostly my fault and not theirs as I didn’t realise I needed a mobile number that can sent/receive sms. Many services require an sms for account setup and it’s a PITA not being able to receive them. Bike sharing and taxis were the two I wanted it for.
The other weird thing was that one of the cards I bought worked in the U.K. and one didn’t. I never did figure that out but the prices are so cheap it wasn’t particularly problematic.
Their (physical) store is also extremely easy to use for a jet lagged foreigner.
If you are paying less than €3/GB (before VAT) they can apply a fair use roaming limit which is lower than your domestic limit Which is calculated from the EU cap of €6/GB - so 25GB is well above what they have to give you for that price.
unfortunately anytime you mention something like this as a reasonable expectation for sane adults within the context of a us-focused discussion, one is almost immediately inundated with any one of:
- business must make a profit
- why are you being a socialist
- think of joe sixpack
- the USA is 'different'
arguments as to why this is not the case, and debate tends to die.
although I guess I'm saying 'the usa is different' in a different way.. so there's that
It's capitalism vs humanism. I'm not really sure why people prefer the former when the latter is an option. (I'm guessing it's knee-jerk from when it's not)
I say humanism because protecting (vulnerable) people from scams in advertising has nothing to do with socialism, and everything to do with people just being excellent to each other and helping one another.
Forces of capitalism have no compassion. It's quite a mechanical system, you can't expect that to produce a system with a consistent and sufficient amount of decency, without it tearing off a limb every once in a while.
Also in Germany you get competent customer service usually, from people who can think. In the US the customer service usually consists first of talking to AI bot and then to a person in Philippines who has trouble with basic English, but asks you to repeat everything you entered / said to the bot.
I've called customer service departments at about a dozen or so US based companies in the last couple of years, and haven't found this stereotype to be fair at all. Most of them were from the US as far as I could tell. Even when they were not, communication was not an issue.
I wonder how much of that is language related? Plenty of people around the world speak English (with varying levels of skill and with various dialects). But not many speak German.
Yes, those are tourist industries, no surprise there's a lot of English. But the tier one customer support for a large teleco, or a bank? They probably aren't requiring fluent English for that.
First contact customer service in Germany are basically call-center farms hiring eastern-Europeans, Italians, and Spaniards as temp-workers, who wait to get out of there as soon a possible.
It's just culture-specific words-play targeting urges of local population. In Germany one can sell one thing but guarantee 50% of it (the cable internet market is an oligopoly):
>And yet I am pretty sure that in Germany at least, that plan would not be allowed to be called "Unlimited", no matter how fine the fine print ends up being.
My German O2 plan is called a "flatrate" and is throttled after 300GB according to their "fair use" policy. Both terms are verbatim what O2 calls it, Germans have a lot of anglicisms. They claim it has "bis zu" 50Mbit/s ("bis zu" meaning "up to").
So sadly no, in Germany Ginger Beer is called Ginger Brew, but DSL contracts are still scammy.
It’s a flatrate. Flatrate only implies the price does not change depending on usage. It does not imply “unlimited” or “no throttle after a certain limit” by itself.
We have a lot of anglicisms in the German language and a few of them have developed meanings different from their English counterparts. The word "flatrate" is one such example. In German it is not taken literally to be a "flat rate" but rather to mean "unlimited".
Yes, I agree with that. We used to have volume and flatrate tariffs for DSL. The flatrates used to be unlimited, then the volume tariffs were removed and the flatrates became volume tariffs with a high (but limited) volume.
"A flat fee, also referred to as a flat rate or a linear rate, refers to a pricing structure that charges a single fixed fee for a service, regardless of usage."
Emphasis mine. I'd understand this as there being a service (e.g. high-speed DSL) which you pay a fixed fee for, independent of how much you use it. That does also mean that if you use it more they don't shut it off, because otherwise you're not getting the service independent of usage.
They don’t shut it off. It’s throttled after reaching a certain limit. It’s also illegal to advertise them as “unlimited” (please note: I’m native german, there’s no language confusion)
I am native german and I disagree on that count. It means “flat fee” and not “unlimited”. Local calls for example used to be “flat rate”, they’d cost a fixed fee but disconnect after about 30 minutes or so. (Yeah, I still remember that personally) Flatrates for mobile data never were unlimited, either.
As also a native german, I have to disagree in turn. Story time:
In the 90s, when the Internet started to come into popularity, me and friends were desperately trying to get a connection that didn't cost money per time unit.
For the longest time, with no free local calls like the US had, that simply did not exist, at least via dialup. One option was a "Standleitung", which was almost literally a permanent landline between you and your provider, same signaling and all. Only small providers would usually be talked into it, but then you had to pay a (at the time) huge monthly fee to the Post/Telekom because the line took resources away permanently. Some few people were lucky enough to be able to establish radio channels with their provider (this was long before WiFi was a thing). At one of my first jobs, I got ISDN "callback" as a benefit, which meant that I could call the router, hang up immediately, the router would call back and establish the connection, company would pay!
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the first few flatrates appeared. Stay online as long as you want, download as much as you want (at speeds that were still measured in kilobytes/second, but completely adequate for the time). It was definitely Unlimited.
Let’s agree to disagree then, because my point is that they were just called “flatrate”. I even just found this article describing “the first flatrates”, which also just calls it “flatrate” without any qualifier throughout the article, but makes it clear from the beginning that a flatrate is, in itself, unlimited: https://www.netzwelt.de/news/76329-verkehrte-netzwelt-erste-...
Finally, I remember the “Alkohol-Flatrates” that came up in clubs a few years later (and were, unsurprisingly, soon outlawed). Their point was that you could get a theoretically unlimited amount of drinks for your cover charge of typically 15DM or so. In practice that’s a stupid idea of course. I tried it once at the behest of a coworker: The drinks were atrocious, the floor was covered in a thick grime of “free drinks” and the crowd consisted of the type of people who would be attracted to an “alcohol flatrate” in the first place.
> It means the data is unmetered. Bandwidth may be throttled.
If bandwidth is to be throttled after a specific amount of data has been used (rather than, say, in response to current overall network load), the data is clearly being metered in order to detect when to start throttling.
It's so pervasive that I automatically ignore any mention of "unlimited" regarding bandwidth or total volume of data. These "unlimited" plans are more like "first X amount of data per month at Y speed; Z speed thereafter", but of course that's not catchy enough for marketing...
Infinity times something finite is still infinite. I think this distinction isn't as important as telling people how much data their maximum really is based on how much they could actually use through the system
Now those advertisements for "wahrscheinlich das beste bier der welt" I used to see while I lived in Germany finally makes sense! At the time I thought they had confidence issues or just wanted to be very precise
I am pretty sure there's no consumer plan that doesn't have bandwidth cap in the US. And even if there wasn't caps, there are physical limits of the channels. So, does it mean no plan can be called "unlimited" at all?
> I think you are not even allowed to say e.g. "the best pizza" in advertising
That is silly. Ads are not peer-reviewed science article. Everybody knows that. Looks like a bunch of governmental busybodies in search of a "problem" they could "fix".
Saying "The Best Pizza" might be allowed if the viewer understand that it's just puffery and it's not really making a claim. It's a fine line though but I think best pizza would be allowed under the law.
Same in France. My plan is 1G/250M unlimited, as in unlimited. I could download at full speed all month long.
They rely on people like me taking the most expensive contract and knowing that nobody will ever max it out (rather running at sub percent levels of the pkan)
I really want to move to another country like Germany for a little while to see how different Capitalism is and get a sense of some sanity in relation to USA.
I do not know what immigration laws would apply. And I do not know what stack (and on what level) you program in. But at least my employer is actively looking for devs (Germany, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich or Frankfurt).
It depends where you are going.
From my experience any degree is ok. And some didnt need that although it did help a little bit with a special visa I was able to get.
I miss those consumer protections a lot since I moved to the US. It sometimes may seem to get a little bit silly (I'm not totally sure, but I think you are not even allowed to say e.g. "the best pizza" in advertising, because how would you prove that claim), but I easily prefer a little silliness over the deliberately misleading claims here.