The blog post fails to notice that AT&T blocked Apple’s FaceTime video chat App on iPhones in 2012 and 2013. Policy Director Matt Wood of the backing group Free Press led out the omission in a tweet:
I guess you can credit Bob Quinn & @ATTPublicPolicy for having the guts to lie so confidently. But when it says @freepress‘s 2010 #NetNeutrality predictions about mobile blocking were wrong, AT&T conveniently omits blocking FaceTime on cellular in 2012. https://twitter.com/ATTPublicPolicy/status/936345215652257792 …
In AT&T’s new blog post, Senior Executive VP Bob Quinn commits back to a prophecy Free Press made in 2010 when the first report of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules was adopted.
“The rules pave the way for AT&T to block your way to third-party applications and to expect you to use its own approved applications,” Free Press said at the time. The 2010 controls imposed fewer limitations on mobile carriers than on home Internet service providers, which is what increased concerns for Free Press back then.
Quinn says now that Free Press’s forecast was totally wrong.
“Of course, none of those prophecies ever came true then and they won’t come true after the FCC acts here either,” Quinn recorded yesterday.
But in fact, AT&T did block FaceTime on its cellular network when users tried to enter the application from particular data plans, such as infinite data packages. Apple made FaceTime work over cellular networks in 2012 with the relief of iOS 6, but AT&T said it would only “enable” FaceTime on cellular if you bought a “Mobile Share data plan.”
Switching to Mobile Share asked unlimited data customers to give up that infinite perk. Even AT&T customers with bounded data plans couldn’t access FaceTime on cellular if they weren’t paying for one of the then-new shared plans. If you didn’t have the correct data plan, you had to use Wi-Fi for FaceTime.
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