Fair Use Policy
The Fair Use Policy (German: Rule for appropriate use ) is usually a clause in the contract between providers and users of flat-rate offers (especially for flat rates in the telecommunications sector), which are intended to restrict the use of flat-rate offers significantly above average. Either the performance of the product or the service is restricted after a certain consumption or the additional consumption is priced. The subject is also known as throttling (the volume of data).
The providers regularly justify these clauses by saying that they should prevent individual users ( power users ) from using the limited resources of the provider so much that other customers suffer as a result. The legal admissibility of such regulations is controversial if the provider openly identifies or advertises his offer as a package deal without usage restrictions. The corresponding fair use policy clause is therefore anchored in the general terms and conditions of many providers as a “resource overload clause” or “server overload clause” . The existence of such clauses does not say anything about whether they are actually used in practice. The larger a provider is, the sooner it will be able to include corresponding frequent users in its mixed calculation . Products or services for which capacity expansion is expensive and difficult to achieve in the short term, on the other hand, are always given a rigid fair use policy .
Alternatively, some providers of private customer flat rate offers assume commercial use, which is excluded according to the contractual provisions, or use other means of pressure against customers - see also telecommunications companies in the criticism .
In the mobile Internet , most tariffs in Germany have a volume limit and when this is reached, they are throttled for the rest of the billing period. Originally the tariffs were called "fair flat".
Individual evidence
- ↑ Drosselkom Telekom buries fraudulent flat rate. Spiegel.de, December 2, 2013, accessed September 25, 2014 .