Let’s say you’re at your favorite pizza joint and you order a pepperoni pizza. The restaurant owner says that there is no more pepperoni pizza available. The proper thing that the restaurant owner would say is that, “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t have any pepperoni pizza available today. Would you be interested in any of  our other menu items?” The decent restaurant owner will not ask you to pay full price for that unavailable pizza and then take a slice or two from somebody else who has also paid full price. The basic concept of fairness (and justice) shows that you exactly get what you pay for.

Apparently, Philippine telecoms like Globe and Smart/PLDT don’t understand the concept of fairness. If you happen to be a subscriber of these companies like me or one of my friends (who provided the screen shot above), you probably have heard about this so-called “fair use” policy. To keep it simple, the “fair use” policy dictates that you are only limited to a certain amount of bandwidth per day (in this example 1 GB). Once you have exhausted that limit, they set your account to a snail-pace-slow connection as to give way for others to experience a faster internet speed. They call this fair. I call this crap! Why do I call this crap? Simple. I signed a contract that guarantees me that for a fixed monthly fee, I get unlimited use at a certain speed (like 1 to 2 Mbps, still sluggish compared to international standards). And all of the sudden, companies like Globe come up with this “fair use” crap that indicates you can only enjoy a sort-of-fast connection up until you consume 1 GB or something like that. Hey! I paid for unlimited use and not for this kind of crap.

Now, this reminds me of my restaurant scene analogy. “Fairness” according to these sneaky Telecom companies is like this: I order a pepperoni pizza for full price and they give me one. Sure, that’s what I expect. Halfway through eating my pizza, they decide to forcibly take my remaining slices and then give it to the next customer, who apparently has also paid for a whole pizza. Is this fairness? This is similar to how communism works: everybody gets the same amount of money whether or not I work harder than the next guy or do nothing at all and receive compensation while the next guy does double duty. It’s the same way how the Philippine government operates: The employed middle-class sweats it out for a certain wage, get taxed at least 30% by the BIR, BIR then decides to pocket some of that money for whims of the politicians (starting from the President downwards) and then hands out a little bit of that money as dole-outs to the lazy majority (armed with a bloated sense of entitlement and limited intelligence).

I work long and hard hours. One reason why I do so is for the benefit of getting a good and reliable internet connection, something that is necessary in the kind of work that I perform. I expect that the money I shell out would guarantee that I get the kind of service I paid for. The “fair use” policy is an injustice to honest, hardworking people who pay money for proper internet services. If Globe, Smart/PLDT, etc. were serious about being fair, they would expand their capacity in a faster rate than they acquire subscribers. It’s not like they are losing any of their profits if they would do such a thing. It’s only proper. With the way that the “fair use” policy goes, it seems to me like Globe and Smart/PLDT do not know any sense of propriety at all.

To reiterate my point, here’s what I think the “fair use” policy is all about:

I urge you all of you to go to this link at Change.Org and sign the petition. Thanks!