“The un-carrier” my ass. Those that thought that there was a renegade CEO taking on the big guys are coming to realize the new boss is the same as the old boss.
If I’m paying (quite handsomly) for data, I should get to decide if I want higher quality or their buffery/jittery mess.
His comments are defensive. The investigation seems to have hit a nerve. He may not have expected an investigation with the amount of technical sophistication that EFF can bring to bear on an issue.
And instead of calling EFF in to work out a resolution, he attacks them in public? He may be trying to cover tracks.
Maybe there are grounds for a consumer class action suit, esp. if an estimate of damages has been quantified.
EDIT: Bingo! “. . . [I]it’s also a deceptive trade practice that punishes users who watch video from non-Binge-On services twice: first, by slowing down their video; and second, by charging the data against the user’s account as though it hadn’t been deliberately degraded.” 
Yes. Same corporate form. Same fiduciary duties to boost market value. Same professional firms giving advice. Same emphasis on ROI.
Different advertising.
I recently tried pretty hard to find a [US] mobile carrier that has some sense of social responsibility, but doesn’t use Sprint’s network (because Sprint coverage is the worst in my area). Sadly, there’s nothing out there, even among MNVOs. I came close with Ting, but their GSM service runs off T-Mobile’s infrastructure and T-Mobile are also union-busters (along with Sprint and Verizon).
In the end, I had to go with AT&T as they’re the most unionized workforce of the major carriers and I’ll just support social causes with my own damn cash.
Call me cynical but how does someone get to the level of CEO of a major company without being able to evade or ignore questions better than that? It seems like the standard procedure for most companies would be to dismiss the investigation without addressing the substance of it and move on hoping no one notices.
I see a golden parachute in this guy’s near future.
His turning into a Rock Star for the T-Mo gig (remember, he was a standard issue boring suit previously) seems to be getting to him. He’s turning into John McAfee! Add a bit more scrubbage to his face on that video and you could hardly tell.
I just turned the Binge-On off since it slows all video down a lot by recoding it. But this is some crazy stuff.
He should, at the very least, be smart enough know to leave that stuff to the PR department. One would think.
Well wow with the recent call from to anywhere in north america the family was about to jump to them and now not so much. 
He might try; but John Legere making it to John McAfee territory would be like David Brooks embracing gonzo journalism and cutting a drug fueled stream-of-consciousness fever dream through the halls of tedious establishment smarm.
Definitely worth watching if it does happen; but far too unlikely to be worth waiting for.
This is hilarious and wonderful and horrifying.
TODO: send EFF more dinero.
He’s hip, he’s cool, he’s 65.
65 in a hoodie with gold chain - not falling for it.
I feel like this gets misrepresented by both sides. I keep hearing “slowing down” repeated in reports. From my understanding (which seems to match with this Verge article) is that they’re just downgrading the video stream. I am curious if they’re just man-in-the-middling when negotiating the stream size or re-encoding it. I was looking into switching to T-Mobile recently, went to a store, heard about Binge-On and how it worked, was horrified and left. That’s not something I want.
However, I can see this being desirable for some people. YouTube already does a rather terrible job at guessing the best stream size; it’ll choose 240p when I’m on a hardwired connection trying to watch a screencast or it’ll download 1080p for some stupid video on my phone. HD Cable TV also does a terrible job–most of it is so compressed it bothers me more than SD ever did. So I’m pessimistic anyone is going to get the quality that’s in the best interest of the user.
If my understanding is correct, then “throttling” does sound like semantics here. So does “slowing down” or “limiting.”
this is actually the greatest urge I have ever had to say “get a haircut, hippie!”
You have to wonder if that’s been the plan all along with guys like these,
Maybe due diligence on CEO level hires should consider such things, Lower level employees can just be summarily dismissed, so not an issue there.
LOL. Boomers are getting really ridiculous. I mean, dude, you cannot get all Richard Branson at 65, you lack the basis, the background, the culture. John Perry Barlow is 66, if you were the Branson type you’d know a thing or two about him.
To be fair, his human story now is interesting, in a train-crash sense. Did he have a mid-life crisis? Did he dump wife and kids? Did he get an American Beauty moment? Is cocaine addiction finally taking its toll? Or was he forced to adopt this persona by some bigger fish (“we have this job for you, but you’ll have to look hip”)? “Millionaire Lifestyle” wants to know!
I think it’s best to think of America’s elite as inbred aristocrats. If you suspect them of having any qualifications - even Machiavellian ones - you are going to be disappointed.
This is why there should be a Uber for CEOs.
I’m pretty sure the gig economy could get us similar results at much cheaper rates.
Read the EFF analysis. They’re not downgrading/optimizing anything. They’re just throttling.
If the source observes the throttle, it will switch to a lower bitrate stream. In that case, the origin server is “optimizing” the stream for the terrible T-Mo service.
If, OTOH, the origin server doesn’t notice/can’t downgrade, the user just has a terrible 1.5Mb/s experience.
Same story if the user is downloading a video for local storage: The identical file gets downloaded, it just takes ~4x longer that it would otherwise.
T-Mo is not changing the video at all, even when it’s transmitted in the clear.
Many video services are wrapped in SSL, making it impossible for T-Mo to optimize anything.
