An employee at the Mises Institute just received a call from his cell-phone service provider. They are cutting off his service, and waving all fees for the last month. It seems that his use was dominating by roaming, which required the use of a tower for which the service had to pay. The company must have concluded that his use was costing more than the company was gaining in service fees from the customer. Now this customer will have to find another provider.
The store reminds me of the “net neutrality” debate in which certain large providers of web content are attempting to prevent owners of hubs and lines from pricing access or preventing access altogether. A net neutrality law would make it impossible to price discriminate based on bandwidth usage. See Tim Swanson’s piece
There is no “tower neutrality” law that would force providers to grant service regardless of network use, no law forcing towers to accept traffic from all comers, no mandates that are designed to compel seamless webs of communication. We all know that every cell phone service has pockets of imperfection that competition between them is gradually working toward eliminating. It is not a perfect system but it seems to be working in the direction in which markets are supposed to work: the best satisfaction of the customer in accord with existing resource scarcities.
Why not for the web too?
