Publications
Publications
- September 2016 (Revised October 2016)
- HBS Case Collection
Internet Data Capping Note
By: Shane Greenstein, Lisa Cox and Christine Snively
Abstract
In April 2016, U.S. federal regulators approved Charter Communications’ acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC). The Department of Justice (DoJ) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC), however, stipulated that the new company could not apply data caps or introduce usage-based pricing to its Internet customers for seven years. Over the course of 2015, the number of consumer complaints filed with the FCC had grown to nearly 8,000. The focus of this note is to highlight some of the controversy surrounding data capping, introduce competing claims and outline the durable and inescapable tensions between different outlooks on pricing Internet service.
Keywords
Internet Service Provider; Data Caps; Compression; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; United States
Citation
Greenstein, Shane, Lisa Cox, and Christine Snively. "Internet Data Capping Note." Harvard Business School Technical Note 617-003, September 2016. (Revised October 2016.)