So when did ‘unlimited’ become ‘fair use’?
I am a sucker consumer like everyone else. I revel in bargains, regularly visit the bargain web sites and love to hear words like free, pricematch and especially…unlimited. Before I get all excited about an unlimited deal though, I always have to cut through all of the fine print, figuring out what unlimited really means.
You probably subscribe to a lot of so-called unlimited services in your life. You might belong to the local gas station’s coffee club that gives you free refills for life in a mug your spent $20 for. Maybe your dialup internet is unlimited and maybe, just maybe, you subscribe to Netflix, a movie service that supposedly sends you as many movies as you can watch in a month for just short of $10. The real question is, have you ever tried to see just how limited your service really is?
My parents live in the country and, until recently, were not able to purchase any kind of internet service, save for dialup. Growing up in the same house with 5 other people and more than a few computers, we all shared dialup internet through a Smoothwall router. Being that not all of us could use the internet at the same time, we found that we were using the internet virtually all of the time, well over 500 hours a month. We were pushing the limits of the connection, using it for real time surfing during the day and then downloading at night. When we started having problems getting connected to our ISP because of busy signals and dropped connections, I found that we were victims of the latest acceptable scam: selling limited services as if there were no limits. I went searching for a new provider and starting bumping into a multitude of services that offer supposed unlimited service, but with fair use policy restrictions.
Let’s take a moment to talk about fair use. What does fair use mean exactly and how does it restrict your access to unlimited services? In short, fair use commonly means that a provider of unlimited services may, at his or her discretion, without regularity and with bias, determine that you have used too much of their unlimited service and cut you off from the service, giving others an equal chance to get ripped off by their scam.
In the warped world of the internet, the word unlimited has somehow lost its value and become a gross overstatement, used to falsely advertise services and make them look better than they really are. In reality, anyone who routinely tries to fully utilize the unlimited services that they purchase will find themselves being pushed off the service, having references to fair use and acceptable use policies quoted to them. They may even face sneakier tactics, like the one that has recently surfaced at movie provider Netflix, which uses an undisclosed (well, not anymore) fairness algorithm to push movies out faster to users who utilize the service the least and slowest to those who rent the most. Say what!?
In short, consumers who enroll in programs offering unlimited services for paltry fees just get shafted, plain and simple, time and again. I, for one am very leary of any service offering unlimited access and have found that I get laughed at a lot, reading all of the fine print before putting my John Hancock on any agreement. Please don’t get me wrong here, I am a very fair person and want the next guy to have just as much opportunity as I do to avail of a service or product, but I am not a socialist, nor do I take butting in line lightly. What is happening more and more is that we accept less than truthful advertising, hoping somehow that we will have contracted with a Utopian provider who truly can offer us unlimited access. In reality, we are just a bunch of dumb sheep. Start demanding unlimited service when advertised, read the fine print, refuse to accept random changes in user agreements and start calling out those who are making millions off your naivity. Corporations: Let’s start injecting a little truth into advertising and maybe you will find that you have a more loyal following because you are being honest about what you are offering, how much it will really cost and what we will really, truly get from you. I will be first in line to sign up for your service, even if it costs a little more and doesn’t offer me ridiculous promises.
Filed under: Technology