Last week FreeConference, a company that offers “free” teleconferencing services, sued AT&T for blocking access by AT&T/Cingular customers to FreeConference’s services. FreeConference’s complaint says the blocking is anticompetitive and violates the Communications Act.
FreeConference’s service sets up conference calls that connect a group of callers. Users are given an ordinary long-distance phone number to call. When they call the assigned number, they are connected to their conference call. Users pay nothing beyond the cost of the ordinary long-distance call they’re making.
As of last week, AT&T/Cingular started blocking access to FreeConference’s long-distance numbers from AT&T/Cingular mobile phones. Instead of getting connected to their conference calls, AT&T/Cingular users are getting an error message. AT&T/Cingular has reportedly admitted doing this.
At first glance, this looks like an unfair practice, with AT&T trying to shut down a cheaper competitor that is undercutting AT&T’s lucrative conference-call business. This is the kind of thing net neutrality advocates worry about – though strictly speaking this is happening on the phone network, not the Internet.
The full story is a bit more complicated, and it starts with FreeConference’s mysterious ability to provide conference calls for free. These days many companies provide free services, but they all have some way of generating revenue. FreeConference appears to generate revenue by exploiting the structure of telecom regulation.
When you make a long-distance call, you pay your long-distance provider for the call. The long-distance provider is required to pay connection fees to the local phone companies (or mobile companies) at both ends of the call, to offset the cost of connecting the call to the endpoints. This regulatory framework is a legacy of the AT&T breakup and was justified by the desire to have a competitive long-distance market coexist with local phone carriers that were near-monopolies.
FreeConference gets revenue from these connection fees. It has apparently cut a deal with a local phone carrier under which the carrier accepts calls for FreeConference, and FreeConference gets a cut of the carrier’s connection fees from those calls. If the connection fees are large enough – and apparently they are – this can be a win-win deal for FreeConference and the local carrier.
But of course somebody has to pay the fees. When an AT&T/Cingular customer calls FreeConference, AT&T/Cingular has to pay. They can pass on these fees to their customers, but this hardly seems fair. If I were an AT&T/Cingular customer, I wouldn’t be happy about paying more to subsidize the conference calls of other users.
To add another layer of complexity, it turns out that connection fees vary widely from place to place, ranging roughly from one cent to seven cents per minute. FreeConnection, predictably, has allied itself with a local carrier that gets a high connection fee. By routing its calls to this local carrier, FreeConnection is able to extract more revenue from AT&T/Cingular.
For me, this story illustrates everything that is frustrating about telecom. We start with intricately structured regulation, leading companies to adopt business models shaped by regulation rather than the needs of customers. The result is bewildering to consumers, who end up not knowing which services will work, or having to pay higher prices for mysterious reasons. This leads a techno-legal battle between companies that would, in an ideal world, be spending their time and effort developing better, cheaper products. And ultimately we end up in court, or creating more regulation.
We know a better end state is possible. But how do we get there from here?
[Clarification (2:20 PM): Added the “To add another layer …” paragraph. Thanks to Nathan Williams for pointing out my initial failure to mention the variation in connection fees.]
