I’ve lived under a rock for 10 years. I did Metro ages ago while most were still on contracts. Surely we’ve reached true capitalist open market freedom by now. Is it still total closed market, noncompetitive, privateering corruption?

    • KoboldCoterieEnglish
      41·
      6 months ago

      Do you not? I really don’t know, I don’t use texts much and we’ve had unlimited texts for like, 15+ years. I always see ‘normal carrier fees apply’ on OTP notifications, so I just assumed they counted against limited plans.

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
        6·
        6 months ago

        Finn here. For us, receiving SMS has never cost anything. Downloading MMS, that used to cost, but no-one uses those.

        Sending an SMS could be as expensive as 20c when I was a kid. And an SMS is 160 characters. So if you wrote a long one it’d send it as three.

        Then when I was about 12-13 there started being unlimited texting packages, which advertised as unlimited but after giving kids access to the service for a few months, limits were soon imposed to like a 1000 sms a month.

        • acetanilide@lemmy.world
          4·
          6 months ago

          I can’t imagine being a teenager with only 1000 sms a month. I think at one point i was sending hundreds of texts per day

          • Zak@lemmy.world
            3·
            6 months ago

            People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.