DRM on books is about the rights holder, not the person selling it. I can assure you that Amazon doesn’t actually give a shit what you do with your books outside of having an obligation to the rights holders.
Yeah, because they wouldn’t be able to offer it otherwise. If they could offer the same content without DRM at the same price, I’m certain they would do it. Apple did with the iTunes Store.
They wouldn’t, simply because their position as the dominant player in ePublishing gives them a massive incentive to lock-in users. Which is what their DRM does: you cannot move books to non-Amazon devices, so you’re stuck on Kindle forever. That this also satisfies publishers is something of a side-effect.
They did the opposite with music (they actually sold simple standard mp3s, unlike what you get from iTunes) because they were challengers, not incumbents, so the priority was to attract users.
I assure you that they care much more about you buying books from them than about "lock-in" from you using their apps and buying their devices. Proof: their apps absolutely suck and their devices are not much better. The devices exist to get you to buy more books from them. It is absolutely not a side-effect that their DRM satisfies publishers.
In my experience in Canada from several years ago, the business teams in wireless telcos don't see it as providing you internet on device x. The ip connection on a device is a gateway towards a service, and the telecoms want to be providers of services, and the differentiator from competitors is having better and different services.
In my opinion the biggest fear of those business development teams is to be treated as or thought of just as providing internet on a device. As being just the pipe is not considered a lucrative market, and open to lots of competition where the race is to the bottom on price. This is also where you get lots of the anti-competitive behaviors, like not investing the effort to make a competitors service optimal within a network, as the carriers would rather launch their own service instead of making someone elses service they don't generate revenue off of work great.
To be fair, in the older gen access technologies, all internet access isn't equal. The access network was optimized for the usage patterns of a mobile browser, in the way it scheduled and idled the radio (I'm glossing over a large number of details). So connecting a computer via tethering that behaves differently and is far more chatty on the network, is actually a much costlier device to support. The current gen techs like LTE do operate much differently, to support chatty devices and apps. With a better optimized network and devices loaded with chatty apps, this difference is probably disappearing.
So if you put yourself in the shoes of a business dev person at a wireless carrier. They'll look at this and say, well we can have a $40 plan for just internet access. Or we can have a $35 plan for just mobile browsing, since that's more efficient and allows us to be more competitive when using the phones browser, and a $15 add on for tethering for those who want it and cost the company more. There are entire teams dedicated to just figuring this stuff out.
And this leads to some of the stuff I would get thrown from time to time, like the $60k bills (no longer allowed in canada, a rule was created to prevent surprise bills, but used to be a thing) when someone bought unlimited mobile browser for $7, and thought that meant unlimited usage for their tethered computer and started torrenting all day which was pay per use.
An unlimited $7 plan only works in the context of the way a user can use a mobile browser, and that's why the carriers think they can dictate how you use the internet connection. They have departments to tailor make plans that only work if they're able to dictate how the internet is used.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this model, I'm just trying to explain where I believe this perspective comes from based on my experience. I've been out of the industry several years now, and my opinions are my own.
This jives with my own experience. Great comment, thanks.
One group was trying to monetize services which were already free. Like make a list of data provided by stock mobile runtimes (Android, iOS), such as location data, and then create a developer portal for accessing that same data thru web services.
I'm having trouble remembering the details because I didn't even understand it at the time. My buddies were contractors, loved this kind of work, the money was good, and you could never fail. They thought there were helping me, get me some cheddar too.
I was briefly on the "mobile app services" team, it took me about 3 months to figure out what we were even doing. But there were lots and lots of meetings. Convened by empire builders and corporate climbers. Expensive suits. And lots of agile, kanban, scrum masters, velocity. To build something biggly impressive for which there would never be customers or revenue.
I assume there was at least one other group trying to "accomplish" the same thing.
The carriers would print money forever if they simply fired everyone unrelated to the actual network (cables and towers) and charged everyone a flat rate. And some overhead of the basic infrastructure services like provisioning numbers and 911.
No metering, no discounts, no custom phones, no carrier add-ons. The actual effort to create additional income streams was ridiculously wasteful.
It was crazy making. The actual features that would be awesome were never part of the conversation. For instance, I'd love to hear my voice mails on my laptop. I'm sure enterprise customers would love some tools for managing fleets of phones. Etc.
Maybe the carriers got high from the SMS profiteering, didn't realize that was a one-off bonanza, and have never recovered.
Much of what you said rings true with me and brings back chills of having a meeting to plan a meeting to discuss actually doing work, except for one piece.
> The carriers would print money forever if they simply fired everyone unrelated to the actual network (cables and towers) and charged everyone a flat rate. And some overhead of the basic infrastructure services like provisioning numbers and 911.
In my experience with these projects, I'm not sure it's safe to conclude that they add up to enough to significantly change the economics of the network. I know working on the projects feels like a huge waste of time and energy, but we're talking a million dollars here and there, when the cables, towers, and core people are spending 500 million plus per year. I'm sure it adds up, but all businesses have overhead, and I don't see it as a game changer.
As for charging a flat rate, I'm actually of the opposite perspective. I realize it's probably unpopular for this community, but for a long time I've been an advocate that mobile usage should be metered by use. The problem I have with the flat rates, is the users who use less always end up subsidizing the power users who use significantly more. Much of the network investment goes into supporting the top end users, but it's everyone else who has to pay for it. For wireline access this might be a bit different roi calculation, but for mobile wireless I think this is a real economics problem, and flat rate is not an incentive for a carrier to support or retain a power user who wants to use lots of data.
So personally I prefer a model that works more like electricity usage or filling a gas tank, where you pay for what you use, and you naturally get a feel for watching 4k video all day costs more. This of course needs the tools in place to understand where the usage is coming from, not to surprise anyone, etc, etc, so it's not a perfect model, but compared to years ago and the rates that could be offered, it seems atleast to me like a more natural model.
- The fees weren't disproportionate with respect to any infrastructure investments. Why should my internet bill triple over the span of a few years while speeds decrease unless I call, wait on hold for a day, and ask to cancel service?
- There weren't an aspect of double dipping -- why are we being charged for peak bandwidth (with absolutely no guarantee of reaching those speeds) and _also_ being charged for exceeding bandwidth caps equivalent to a few dozen minutes of full use? Why is that "extra" bandwidth more expensive than buying several extra full internet plans?
- It didn't open the door to metering different content sources differently based on the ISP's monopolistic whims.
There are physical bandwidth limits, and those need to be allocated somehow, but the status quo isn't great.
Thanks for this detailed explanation. It’s really strange and I’m so glad this practice didn’t take hold where I’m from. Granted, mobile data is really expensive here so it probably wouldn’t make sense, anyways.
You give me internet on device X. How is it up to you how I use it?