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Europe To Cap Roaming Fees

Looks like the EU is going to finally address the mess that is European cell phone roaming:

[from Europe Weighs Caps on Roaming Fees for Text Messages - NYTimes.com by Kevin O'Brien]

The European Union’s telecommunications minister will propose price controls that would substantially reduce the roaming fees that individuals are charged to send text messages and limits that could reduce the cost of using the Internet.

Details of the proposal, obtained Wednesday by The International Herald Tribune, show that the minister, Viviane Reding, will seek to cap retail roaming fees for short text messages, or S.M.S., within the European Union at 11 euro cents, or 16 American cents, a message.

That would be a 62 percent reduction from the current average of 29 cents, according to the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union.

Ms. Reding also intends to recommend a cap on the wholesale cost of using cellphones to gain access to the Internet — the fees operators charge each other — that would halve the average cost to one euro a megabyte.

Roaming prices range from 6 cents in Estonia to 80 cents in Belgium, according to the European Regulators Group, a panel of the European Union’s 27 national telecommunications regulators.

This move is coming none too soon, and represents a great weight lifted for many people: not just globe trotting business people, but the very common person in Europe who frequently moves across the very porous borders there.

John Stuart Mill

It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and particularly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.

[quoted in The Social Origins Of Good Ideas by Ronald Burt]

SocialU: It's All About You, If You're A Virtually Materialistic Narcissist

SocialU is a new lifestreamingish social application, that goes to enormous lengths to create a cheesy social environment centered on fungible social gestures, like giving a contact an electronic package of french fries. To 'buy' the fries, users can apply their initial stake of $500,000 social dollars or earn more cash by doing various social things: adding friends, making comments, etc.

socialu - it's all about you v0.0.3287, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I am all for giving friends gifts, but the ersatz quality of SocialU is depressing. I can't see myself participating in a meta-community -- the system allow you to open tabs on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Bebo, and just about any other social app out there, in various tabs -- that is principally focused on translating social gestures into virtual currency, and then distributing that cash by buying virtual bling, property or other e-goods, and possibly gifting other contacts.

Forgive me for being subject to social physics, but I would like my socialization to be about something, like tachnology, or saving the world, or collecting toy trains. But this 'hall of mirrors', self-reflecting social hypodermic needle doesn't add anything that we need.

Perhaps the sort of obsessiveness associated with Tamagotchi pets plays here -- another fad I never thought added up to much.

And it is not the materialism per se that irks me. I am all for sites like ThisNext, where people share recommmendations about stuff -- furniture, gizmos, jewelry -- because I buy in on the idea that all e-commerce will be social in the near future. But this is phony, like giving food pellets to pigeons in a Skinner box for going through the motions of social interaction. I am all for social karma (or "swarmth") building up in the innards of social tools, but directly tying actions to specific economic inducements, instead of an algorithmic authority or reputation is a terrible way to go.