What’s Good for Verizon and AT&T Is Terrible for American Consumers

[Commentary] This summer, the very big wireless carriers in America, Verizon (106 million subscribers) and AT&T (99 million), are poised to get even bigger. As they move towards squashing cheap data substitutes for expensive voice minutes, consider charging application providers to reach subscribers, layer on fees for additional devices, and collect overage charges for data usage, they will bulk up on customers and revenue. This is good for them, but not good for the rest of us.

You can bet that AT&T will be making it very difficult for other connectivity services (modern-day versions of voice and text) to reach subscribers without paying tribute to AT&T. Indeed, AT&T’s inadvertently-announced “1-800″ toll-free applications idea is exactly this: Applications that pay AT&T will not be subject to users’ data caps and will “feel” free. But applications that try to run over the top will trigger usage caps and may be digitally roughed up in other ways. We should be talking about fiber networks that enable rich clouds of nomadic connectivity and commodity devices that can access those networks and any content or application they want. Wireless policy is fiber policy, and abundant network capacity should be our common goal. Instead, we’re navigating through a thicket of press releases this summer that all signal the carriers’ power to charge whatever they like for uses of their platform by everyone involved. The bottom line could not be clearer: AT&T and Verizon plan to get even bigger in 2012, and users will pay in the long run.