Here’s a very awesome video that explains the situation the best. It’s from a guy in Canada, where they’ve had caps for a long time:

Verizon’s CEO denied interest in a Sprint deal in a statement released today:

“We’re not interested in Sprint. We don’t need them,” said Mead, speaking to Reuters ahead of the CTIA Wireless Conference.

You may not need them, but your shareholders might. Unregulated capitalism inevitably leads to consolidation in the market, and if Sprint begins to take customers from AT&T and Verizon, he may be forced to act.

As a FYI, the cause now has a Twitter account. All posts to the site will be announced there as well on RSS, so you can stay informed 🙂

Well, this is unexpected:

AT&T announced on Sunday that it has agreed to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion in cash and stock, in one of the biggest mergers since the onset of the financial crisis.

The deal will dramatically bolster AT&T’s footprint in the country, adding an additional 46.5 million customers.

(It makes more sense from a technology perspective than the Sprint/T-Mobile merger the rumor mill thought was going to happen, anyway, but that’s a different subject for another day.)

Sadly, after the deal completes, there’ll only be three national wireless carriers: one GSM carrier (AT&T) and two CDMA carriers (Verizon and Sprint). Fewer competitors in an industry is never a good thing, regardless of the industry, and this is no exception. Verizon already follows AT&T in whatever it does, so how long will it be until Sprint has to follow to maintain profitability? How long will it be until Sprint get bought out by Verizon too?

I hope the FCC and regulators keep that in mind when approving this merger, but why do I have this feeling it’ll just get approved without conditions anyway? This stuff is why we need to fight for true competition in the telecommunications industry. It’s far bigger than a single ISP imposing bandwidth caps–this is the future of the Internet and mobile technology at stake.

From Free Press, a media reform group:

At worst, this is a plan designed to discourage cord-cutting and pad profits; at best, this is another example of an antiquated phone-company business model being forced onto an otherwise vibrant and limitless marketplace.

Indeed. Right now, I’m watching the Al-Jazeera English live stream on my PS3. Hulu has the TV shows that I would be watching from a DVR, and Netflix has movies that would be on HBO/Showtime or on a cable company’s On Demand service. We are rapidly reaching the point technologically where purchasing TV service from AT&T or a cable company isn’t really necessary any more. And they’re scared of having to compete with the Internet for people’s entertainment.

From a comment that I made on Reddit:

Even if AT&T changes their mind, it’s not going to solve the real issue: most people in the US have the choice of 2 or fewer Internet providers, and other ISPs are going to continue to try to push this on people. I’m going to write my representatives as well and push for policies that encourage competition in the ISP industry, and I encourage you to do the same.

In the meantime, if you have AT&T DSL and your cable provider also caps, I would look into switching to a CLEC such as DSLExtreme if you’re in SoCal, or Sonic if you’re in the Bay Area; they don’t have caps AFAICT. There might be other companies similar to them outside of California as well. If you can only get AT&T DSL (e.g. no CLECs) and you really need Internet at home, then switch to the absolute lowest Internet plan you can possibly get with them and cancel any of their other services that you don’t absolutely need. This will reduce your liability if you do get owned by malware/WiFi leechers and help to hurt AT&T’s bottom line. If possible, do this over the phone and tell them the caps are why you’re downgrading/ending service.

This site was posted to Reddit. Awesome.

Speaking of Reddit, spread this site far and wide! This is an issue that will affect the entire Internet, not just people on a single ISP.