T-Mobile CEO to EFF: ‘Who the Fuck Are You?’

300 点作者 tshtf超过 9 年前

25 条评论

We pay the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Consumers, geeks, and the privacy/digital rights inclined. They're doing exactly what donors want them to be doing, including this Binge On thing (which is part of a larger Net Neutrality struggle).I am a T-Mobile customer. And when they first introduced Binge On I was mostly happy (Net Neutrality notwithstanding): seemed like a fair trade, for certain sites you lost video bandwidth but in return received unlimited streaming.However T-Mobile's implementation is bad and worse still they weren't honest about what Binge On does. It is a completely different arrangement between ONLY limiting sites that signed up, and interfering in third parties who did not, and don't even get me started on limiting video file download rates (i.e. not streaming).The CEO is just acting like an idiot. Consumer rights groups, like the EFF, are completely entitled to "stir things up" when large national corporations start acting poorly. If you guys didn't want to be called out, perhaps you could have been more honest to begin with? So as a T-Mobile customer, I am 100% behind EFF on this one. If they started attacking the EFF regularly I'll change networks (e.g. Project Fi), because I value the EFF more than T-Mobile.PS - Amazon's Smile.Amazon.com supports EFF donations, as an aside.

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etjossem超过 9 年前

John Legere is the CEO of a multinational telecommunications company. Of course he knows what the EFF is.At first, he was just trying to explain BingeOn to T-Mobile customers in a favorable way - "optimization for mobile devices to stretch the data available on your plan." And that's exactly what an informed consumer should expect him to say. You're not going to hear the words "reduced quality by default" or "sweetheart deals with content providers" come from the mouth of a man with fiduciary duty to T-Mobile.But trying to discredit the EFF will blow up in his face. If auto company execs feigned ignorance about Consumer Reports and Kelley Blue Book, we'd laugh at them. It's a transparent way to avoid answering the questions these consumer watchdog groups raise.

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lambda超过 9 年前

I love how he says that it's not throttling, while comparing it to economy mode on a car. Which is, well, literal throttling to give you less performance but better economy.I would not mind them offering the feature if they were honest up front about what it is. It is throttling; it is reducing the bandwidth available for particular downloads, in order to use less or none of your data plan. Now, there are still some net neutrality problems with the fact that certain service providers use none of your data allowance while others do still count against it.But anyhow, why try to sell this as not throttling when that's exactly what it is; throttling, but you get some benefit in that you don't have to pay as much for those throttled streams?

mangeletti超过 9 年前

IMHO, the CEO is being disingenuous.I apologize in advance for this rant:T-Mobile knows exactly what it's doing. If they had announced an open platform with open specs for implementing low-bandwidth video, and then said "if you have this, we'll use it", the end result would be that everyone could benefit from an innovation of theirs.Instead, they partnered up with the largest media providers to save themselves and those media providers money on bandwidth. He's smart enough to know that favoring companies that "have the technology to do this" really means favoring large corporations, which is bad for the little guys.If this wasn't true, there wouldn't be "50 new companies applying" to take part in some application process to be approved... to be on their special little Internet. By even having an application to be involved, they're creating the framework for control and favoritism right from the start.His creepy "we're just trying to help everyone and make the world a better place" stuff is not fooling anyone. T-Mobile is in it for themselves and themselves only. Keep your corruption away from our Internet and name your service something other than "Internet".

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kin超过 9 年前

IMO he's upset because he feels like T-Mobile is very much on the side of the customers. As a T-Mobile customer I certainly feel that way. Free unlimited streaming for music and video? Unlimited streaming on all content for the holidays? He talks about how the industry is corrupt and T-Mobile started the Jump! program which is awesome. They are also huge in the contract-free movement.I'm also pretty sure he's unaware of how Binge On works from a technical standpoint. Philosophically he backs it. I'm guessing it's not well implemented, EFF found this, and now Legere is upset because if EFF were on the consumer side, they would not try stir trouble with T-Mobile, because T-Mobile is making gambles taking on the side of the consumer.

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dogma1138超过 9 年前

Is this guy an alumni of the John McAfee school of management? Never heard of him before but now I've watched some of his other stuff on YouTube some of it is pure gold....

fastball超过 9 年前

I'm not sure how I feel about this.I mean, Binge On is obviously targeted at customers who have limited data plans and seem likely to go over their cap if they watch video normally. Many (most?) streaming sites don't provide fine-grained control over what quality is delivered to your device. Seems like a lot still just differentiate between "normal" and "HD". So it seems to me like T-Mobile is trying to help their limited customers out by lowering the bandwidth on videos so that data is used up a slower rate. I personally have an unlimited data plan, so I can't even provide anecdotal evidence, but if I had a limited plan, I think I would appreciate that.Once bitrate management is in place, throttling doesn't seem like a big deal. As long as I am still being delivered data at a rate > the rate at which I am consuming the video (i.e. as long as there is no buffering) then there isn't really a problem, right?If you disagree with T-Mobile's decision to choose what bitrate is good for you, then yeah, I understand, this sucks. If, on the other hand, you are OK with this, then I don't really think there is an issue.What I think would be the best option would be for T-Mobile to have some sort of control panel that customers could use to pick a bitrate cap for all videos that they watch on their mobile plan. Seems like that could please both parties if they started with a fairly restrictive default setting but users could change it.

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RoboErectus超过 9 年前

I'm going to guess that the reason he's saying it's not throttling is because that's the explanation he's been given by his engineering team. Or he said "let's optimize video in a way that isn't throttling."He's calling it semantics because of Dunning-Kruger. Because he doesn't really know how any of this works, but his ego is so big Superman couldn't lift it, he inflates his surface understanding to expert level.Tmo should publish a spec that allows any provider to meet their definition of optimized video and therefore qualify for binge on. I'm totally fine with it as long as they don't get to choose who gets unlimited streaming.As it is, and as a current tmo customer, this is eye opening. Tmo had always seemed to be the voice of reason in American wireless. What they did with contracts was a massive step in the right direction.But this makes it look like they don't actually get it. They just happened to accidentally get a few things right.

mxxx超过 9 年前

Gee that video really made me cringe.Hey, maybe if we dress the CEO in a hoodie, put him in front of an electric guitar with his batman figurines and make him say edgy things like "bullshit" a couple of times, the kids will relate to him!Cowabunga dudes!

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DanBC超过 9 年前

> it includes a proprietary technology and what the technology does is not only detect the video stream, but select the appropriate bitrate to optimize to the mobile device,This sounds okay if you don't think about it too much.I've seen what a piss-poor job T-Mobile does of image optimising, and so I feel sorry for the people stuck on the other end of a T-Mobile connection having their videos fiddled with.It's not just image quality that suffers, everything about it is stupid. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484081" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484081</a>

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peteretep超过 9 年前

John Legere is ... interesting.He used to look like this: <a href="http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/if4q5M1spdSM.jpeg" rel="nofollow">http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/if4q5M1spdSM.jpeg</a>And now he looks like this: <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0Qvjw-CMAAFn8j.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0Qvjw-CMAAFn8j.jpg</a>Are there many other CEOs who have embraced their corporate branding so seriously?

neumino超过 9 年前

He thought he could pick on EFF like he does on other carriers. That was his worst move so far.

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diebir超过 9 年前

He's not going to be the CEO for much longer. Quite probably, being too smart is detrimental to CEO career, but being obviously dumb in interactions with the media is not tolerated at all.There was once a CEO of Seagate that could not contain himself and said something to the effect that people "buy drives to store porn". He was gone soon there after.

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arianvanp超过 9 年前

Now that I gave it another thought. Isn't the only way to comply with net neutrality to throttle _all_ video instead of certain video? And isn't that exactly what T-mobile is trying to do here? It still sucks because it is misleading, but I sort of get where they're coming from.

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jackmoore超过 9 年前

Just wanted to remind folks that you can support the EFF through AmazonSmile.

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silveira超过 9 年前

Ok, I'm making a donation to EFF.

denova超过 9 年前

T-Mobile customers, feel free to write to them at:<pre><code> T-Mobile Customer Relations P.O. Box 37380 Albuquerque, NM 87176-7380 </code></pre> I couldn't find an email address.

jrcii超过 9 年前

I'm not sure how Steve Buscemi got to be CEO of T-Mobile but he's making a big mistake picking a fight with the EFF.

intrasight超过 9 年前

Neither T-Mobile nor EFF nor net neutrality come out looking good on this one. As others have pointed out in this discussion, net neutrality is a thing for broadband wired Internet where there is rarely competition, not for wireless internet where there is plenty of competition and one way to compete is to offer compelling services. But the T-Mobile CEO is a jerk and that rarely works out well for anyone.

karcass超过 9 年前

He's the Trump of Telecom

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shmerl超过 9 年前

He picked the wrong target. It was fun when he was poking AT&T and Verizon who deserved it. But EFF? That's going to backfire. And especially since T-Mobile is indeed violating Net Neutrality.

placeybordeaux超过 9 年前

Off topic:Who the hell edited this video? There are an insane amount of cuts.

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devy超过 9 年前

Disclaimer: I had been an AT&T mobile customer for more than a decade and subscribed with Verizon and Sprint each for a few years before jumped to T-Mobile about 2 years ago and happily ever since.If you read through the entire EFF report on BingeOn [1], you will see that there are only two problems EFF had with T-Mobile's BingeOn program:1. "Throttle" or "Downgrade/optimize" (pick a word depending on your viewpoint for either side) of all HTML5 video streams2. Opt-in by defaultNet neutrality debates aside, I love BingeOn since day one and didn't notice much of degradation of video quality when I watch videos with BingOn (I still left it on)All the arguments EFF against BingeOn, T-Mobile can easily tweak their program to easily comply.Regarding #1, I suspect it's more of a technical challenge than an illicit intent [2] (of saving data bandwidth, which of course if the win-win situation T-Mobile wanted). Some like YouTube has proprietary steaming intricacies that T-Mobile have had technical difficulties to selectively "Throttle" or "Downgrade" only content partners so it's easier to just do it for all as hinted by this WSJ article about YouTube's reluctance of signing on BingOn.[3]As far as #2 goes, again, no doubt T-Mobile wanted to save their bandwidth at the same time get credits for it putting a marketing campaign around its practice, but EFF (given the sensitivity about Net neutrality) and YouTube(very opinionated about user experience on video quality) certainly have different viewpoints about it.In the end, as a T-Mobile customer, my heart still sides with John Legere's latest unconventional and controversial un-carrier move becauseA) I still have a choice to turn BingeOn off (though I won't as I would rather save 2/3 of my data cap to do something else and very gladly and gracefully accept my zero-rated video content allowances on partnered video sites.)B) I am optimistic about T-Mobile to eventually figure out a way to selectively (as opposed to indiscriminately) "optimize" video content on only partnered video sites so that it will be more compliant with net neutrality. There is a technical challenge to overcome after all.C) Despite of profanity and inappropriate wardrobes, I, as an mobile customer, love what John Legere has done for wireless subscribers in the U.S. and the direction he set for the industry. Needless to say, results are self-explanatory. [4][1]: <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...</a>[2]: <a href="http://www.androidcentral.com/bingeon-terrible-purpose-and-john-legere-needs-stop" rel="nofollow">http://www.androidcentral.com/bingeon-terrible-purpose-and-j...</a>[3]: <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/11/12/t-mobiles-problem-with-youtube-whats-a-video-and-whats-not/?mod=rss_Technology" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/11/12/t-mobiles-problem-wit...</a>[4]: <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3046877/who-the-is-this-guy-john-legeres-strategy-for-taking-new-customers-by-storm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcompany.com/3046877/who-the-is-this-guy-john-...</a>

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gcb0超过 9 年前

i would have continued to be a customer of they said "it's a technology limitation, but the benefits are great and we plan to work on improving the side effects" (even if i know for sure the last part was a lie).

mahouse超过 9 年前

The EFF? A liberal lobby.

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