Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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I find myself really agreeing with Alex Lindsay on removing barriers to being able to sue Tech companies. I completely see Denise Howell’s (yay Denise is here!) point regarding Section 230, but it would seem possible to craft things to remove some protections without tampering with 230.
One of the things they can do is to remove the requirement for arbitration and instead make it optional.
A great discussion this week, although it did feel like it was a promotion for Jason’s new book at times. I know that wasn’t the intent and it just happened that there was a lot to talk about around Amazon this week.
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One reason Leo may have found it difficult to convince people that zero-rating is bad for consumers and competition is because it is not. At least not in every case; zero rating music and video services was one way T-Mobile used to gain market share and make the US cell phone market more competitive.
On the other hand, it reduces competition in the zero rated space, people will use the “free” service, because they can use it as much as they want, not because it is the best or the right one for them, but because they don’t have to worry about how much data it uses.
If they zero rated streaming music, as opposed to just Spotify, it whoever, that would be acceptable, but to zero rate one brand? Not good.
T-Mobile in fact zero rated all music (and later video apps I believe) that met some technical criteria.
It is not clear to me that zero rating a single app is necessarily anticompetitive either. It could be a good way for an app with less market share to make gains or for a cell service with less market share to make gains.
Markets and product decisions are complex and I don’t think it is clear that bundles or packages are anticompetitive. For example, while I have a lot of personal disagreement with how Apple does business a lot of the discussions of the App Store and sideloading and related issues are not addressing the fact that Apple is selling an ecosystem of related products. I believe apple believes that ecosystem is fundamental to their offering.
Great to have Denise back. Did it seem to anyone else that Leo talks over her more than anyone else? There were a few times when it seemed to me he was leaping ahead to respond to what he thought she was going to say without waiting to hear what she really meant to say.
I persoanally find no value to prime… they occasionally offer me free trials, I’ll sign up then go through the Iliad to set it to not renew. Maybe it’s just the region where I live but I find no real shipping speed increase between prime and just letting my cart get above $25 (which is almost anything nowadays) and ordering with free shipping. I know the USPS does final mile where I’m at.
It was the only thing T-mobile could do because their coverage was so awful. I would imagine by now they’ve had a chance to beef their network up but I’ll gladly keep my Firstnet (through AT&T) as long as I can…