DISQUS

Richard Bennett · 2 years ago

The lunacy of the neutrinos never ceases to amaze me.

galets · 2 years ago

just wanted to share some of my own experiences with you... As it's often happening is our politicized society, when someone is talking about making the game fair to consumers, it might just mean the opposite. When I hear about consumer protection acts, I actually think: here comes some more legal base to protect big company FROM consumer claims.

but enough observations, just facts: I recently received a message from Skype, which read: "our free calling services to USA and Canada has ended, if you want to call USA and Canada for free, subscribe to a yearly plan". I thought: this is pretty neat! Plan seems to be fairly cheap and I have a wife in Moscow, Russia. Why not get an unlimited calling plan so that she can be calling me on the cellphone whenever she wants? So, I went to the Skype website and read terms. I felt a little uncomfortable when I noticed that offer is only valid in USA and Canada, but I thought: okay, she might not physically be here, but I am. So as long as I sponsor her purchase, we're fine. In the end, how will they determine where one comes from - by ip address? No way in hell this is going to happen.

guess what - it DID happen. I started noticing that regardless the unlimited calling plan on account, all of her calls were charged per minute anyway. I contacted the customer service to have charges rolled back and received an answer: "you're calling from a foreign IP address, we are not providing this service to outside IPs". This was not mistake - they were dead serious - you can call USA phone for free, but only if your IP is based in USA

Why would that be a case? Skype doesn't incur any additional costs by connecting call coming from an IP in Russia, nor any other one for the same argument. We're not in China. Skype has no pressure from government to limit the freedom of communications. There is no geography in the internet - it's supposed to be one big network where any node freely accesses any other node free of additional cost. So, why is the convenient calling plan being blocked from non-USA ip addresses? The only reasonable explanation is because Skype doesn't want to allow people use discounted rates when they can charge them full price. When it means revenue, it's ok to bend concepts to your own advantage.

Now you should see why I take the struggle of "fair" Skype with "wrong" providers with a grain of salt. Skype is as wrong as they are. It just uses our support to bet a bigger piece of pie and once a piece of pie is received it would exploit consumers with the same unfairness as every other big corporation does