Pokémon Go data usage draws attention of House Energy and Commerce Committee [pdf]

Those questions seem a bit loaded; since when does a business have any responsibility to &quot;make the customer whole&quot; in the event they exceed their data cap?<p>Yes, they could be more transparent about how much data is being used. Maybe display it in the settings somewhere. However, I can&#x27;t see how a customer being slapped with a large bill falls on anyone other than the customer. Does Google have a plan to make me whole when I watch too many youtube videos? Or Apple when I stream too much Apple Music? Instagram when it pre-loads movies as I scroll through the app?

I feel like this isn&#x27;t really the House Energy and Commerce Committee&#x27;s job... Like, people choose their plan(s) and should be able to be responsible for themselves.

I&#x27;ve been playing Pokemon Go since the day of release, and my cellular settings report the app has only used 230MB of data out of my 5GB per month. I&#x27;m not too concerned about data usage - I&#x27;d rather Niantic cache more to reduce load on servers.

Some Senator&#x27;s kid maxed out their data plan in a few days and now they&#x27;re writing an angry customer service letter.<p>I really hope the outcome is that cell companies are forced to get rid of caps but we all know how much money telecom companies donate to prevent this kind of regulation.

The real question is, why aren&#x27;t the mobile carriers giving us more data? 5GB per month seems unreasonable for a $100 mobile plan.

Pokemon Go is fairly low data usage, 10-20 MB per hour of play (which this document lists) is nothing compared to the hundreds of megabytes you can blow in 10-20 minutes streaming video.<p>Few other apps go out of their way to make similar warnings, instead they rely on the OS to do this for you, Android at least allows you to set both a warning and a stop point for your data consumption very easily. Many mobile providers prevent surprises to their customers by sending a text at 50%, 75%, 90% and then stopping unless they reply at 100%.

This is what the term &quot;nanny state&quot; was invented for, right? Why is your data usage the govt&#x27;s, Niantic&#x27;s, or a telco&#x27;s responsibility?

I can get 30Mbit&#x2F;s (3.75MB&#x2F;s) to my handset and they&#x27;re worried about _10-20MB per hour?_ The problem here isn&#x27;t the data usage by Niantic: it&#x27;s the carrier rate plans.

I know it&#x27;s from big, scary government, but why would they ask a few yes&#x2F;no questions without requiring any sort of detail? A high school newspaper could do a better investigation.<p>Dear Congresspeople Pallone, DeGette, and Schakowsky,<p>Thank you for reaching out to us. I hope this response reaches you before the August 9, 2016, deadline.<p>1. Yes 2. No 3. No 4. No<p>Kind regards, Niantic.

&quot;A recent survey found that the average user spends 43 minutes on Pokémon Go per day, compared with 30 minutes on WhatsApp, 25 minutes on Instagram, and 22 minutes on Snapchat.&quot;<p>How is this even a useful statement? I&#x27;m thinking that 22 minutes of video is going to be a lot more data than 43 minutes of playing a game.<p>side note: I hope an irritated group of howling howler monkeys shadow every speech of any politician that distributes a PDF that cannot be selected from because its a friggin image file.

A better question would be: Why US carriers have overpriced data plans and&#x2F;or outdated infrastructure when my third world country provides me with better price&#x2F;performance that makes the Americans look like they are being ripped off?<p>7$ per month assures me of download speed 300mb&#x2F;s 100mb&#x2F;s upload speed and unlimited traffic on fiber. Do you have better deals guys?

Was a similar inquiry conducted with Snapchat? I&#x27;ve read several stories of 4-figure data bills having been run up by teenagers addicted to the service, but have not read about Congressional investigations into that issue. This letter seems like a desperate attempt by its authors to ride the wave of publicity currently surrounding Pokemon Go - it&#x27;s clickbait for Congresspeople.

I don&#x27;t pay anything for Pokemon Go but I pay way too much for self-righteous grandstanding from lawmakers.

The house should be asking questions. But it shouldn&#x27;t be of Niantic; it should be of the carriers, who are treating a not-very-scare resource as if it were far more valuable than it is, thanks to their poor management of a government-granted monopoly.

When are all the other GO apps going to be released?<p>Mario Kart GO (ok that&#x27;s a risky proposition)<p>Super Smash Bros Go<p>Zelda GO<p>Silent Hill GO or Resident Evil GO<p>Augmented reality after many years I think will change video games and how we play them. Virtually reality for me no thanks .. bulky and uncomfortable in it&#x27;s current form.<p>Now if you could wear sun like glasses in which augments reality (see &amp; explore a new world via these lightweight sunglasses) that would be cool!

I have completely secondary questions related to the politics of it: why is &quot;democrats&quot; in the URL, don&#x27;t they de-politize the working groups? isn&#x27;t the majority of the congress Republican? What about the &quot;ranking member&quot; in the signatures? wikipedia doesn&#x27;t really explain what it means.<p>On a side note, I&#x27;d like to add that this is an initiative from the legislative power, not the government, and that this is a discussion and not an enforcement. One of the big job of the legislative power is taking the pulse of the world to try to inform their voting on law matters. If I were libertarian, I would be really pleased to have a heads up before any law is moved in my field of activity, and knowing the move has been made after at least an enquiry has been made.

3 Democrats. :|<p>But yeah, this is silly. People have to be responsible for their own choices after some point.

Never mind the data usage, how about the House <i>ENERGY</i> committee focus on the woefully inefficient battery usage the app has? I mean, that directly impacts their area by way of forcing heaps of people to charge devices far more often.

It seems the consensus here is that data plans from US cell providers are more expensive than they should be for their little amount of data. I&#x27;m curious what the technical constraints of allowing more data for consumers would be. If increasing everyone&#x27;s data amount is <i>free</i> for providers, then what&#x27;s stopping providers from getting in a battle for the largest data amount for a given fixed price? Since this isn&#x27;t the case, there must be some actual cost&#x2F;constraint for serving data ofer 3G&#x2F;4G&#x2F;LTE.

Isn&#x27;t asking content-providers to subsidize the cost of data for the users of their app contrary to network neutrality (which all three of the representatives signing this letter voted in favor of)?

State, this is none of your business! Focus on real issues! What are we, infants who cannot keep track of our data usage? What are the cell phone carriers, imbeciles who cannot maintain infrastructure at high loads? This is an example of how the state poisons harmless interactions between consenting parties by making up problems to grow and gain more legislative power.

These numbers are flat out wrong, there&#x27;s no way that the game uses &#x27;10 to 20 megabytes of data per hour&#x27; jpmorgan must have fucked that up somehow. I can&#x27;t be bothered typing out the whole url referenced in (5) but that&#x27;s just wrong.

Isn&#x27;t monitoring of data usage of apps an OS-level issue&#x2F;responsibility of the user or their parents? Why is it the fault of Niantic? Any game could easily use loads of data, and 10-20Mb&#x2F;hour doesn&#x27;t seem that much given what it does.

I now wonder if the &quot;server issues&quot; are more an overloaded local cell network.

Tip: Download an Offline Area in your Google Maps settings for your local region.

The only thing more infuriating than the fact that this letter was sent out...is that taxpayer money went to some incompetent person who couldn&#x27;t be bothered to use a proper small-caps font.

&gt; recent reports suggest that playing Pokemon Go could exhaust a consumer&#x27;s available monthly mobile data.<p>Well, I&#x27;ll be. Poor consumers.<p>Ranking members Frank, Diana and Jan might be exhausting your tax dollars.

I&#x27;ve been playing this game quite a bit (level 20) and my data usage is a mere 122MB since July 1. It ranks 4th among apps in my overall data usage.

i feel like they&#x27;re trying to stay ahead by focusing sights on niantic before the public shows up at the telcos with pitchforks. lame overall.

Wow the report that I published was cited in the letter! Kinda cool!<p>Two questions:<p>1. How did Congress get our note? 2. Why is Congress spending time doing this?

Gosh. Do you still not have unlimited data plans in the US?<p><pre><code> love, Europe </code></pre> (EDIT - I was rather expecting downvotes for that glib post but there was a serious intent. You guys should be angry about your mobile and cable data situation. Very angry. It&#x27;s pretty much the most expensive in any country I&#x27;m aware of. No doubt there are countries with a worse story on data charges but I&#x27;ve not been there)

Is the app uploading pictures all day?

Give me a break.<p>This is yet another reminder that Serious People hate anything which is fun. If you&#x27;re playing the game for hours of time, it of course uses data. Per minute, its data usage is actually rather minimal.

If Pokemon Go results in legislation mandating reasonable rates for mobile data I will buy a Wii U and several shares of Nintendo stock.

3 good things could come out of Pokemon Go and similar games&#x2F;apps&#x2F;trends:<p>1. smartphones will finally have decent batteries (e.g. lasting at least 1 day for the avg PokemonGo player, aka days&#x2F;weeks for the rest of the world)<p>2. through healthy competition, carriers hopefully stop charging ridiculous amount of money for data<p>3. convergence of home wifi and carriers, i.e. you can use and share your home wifi within miles from your home<p>&lt;&#x2F;tooOptimistic&gt;