It’s safe to say the general consensus is against AT&T charging for FaceTime over cellular in iOS 6. The carrier is expected to introduce some sort of fee for Apple’s video calling service this fall, and AT&T has been trying its best to keep the issue quiet for as long as it can. While you would still be able to use FaceTime over a WiFi connection, carriers like AT&T obviously doesn’t want a bunch of video calls hogging everyone’s bandwidth.
Minnesota Senator Al Franken has been very vocal in the tech scene for years. He famously emailed Steve Jobs about the iPhone tracking debacle back in 2011, and he has continued to stand up for consumer privacy rights with the carriers and companies like Carrier IQ.
Franken recently spoke out on AT&T potentially charging its subscribers for FaceTime over cellular, noting that it would be flat-out “wrong.”
Nilay Patel of The Verge in an interview with Franken:
Franken notes that there’s a difference between “network management” and additional fees for tiers of carrier service. If a service (like video calling) is causing AT&T’s network to buckle, then AT&T may need to charge its customers to help support the extra weight. Even then, I find that argument to be a little weak. There’s a difference between service costs and additional fees for how that service is used.
The point naturally progresses into a broader issue of how specifically the carriers should be able to charge for data and the like. If AT&T gives you a certain allotment of data each month, why do you have to pay extra to tether with your iPad or MacBook? Bits should be treated as bits.
Source: The Verge
