Which is not how it works in the rest of the world. Only U.S. consumers are so used to getting screwed that they would defend it as normal. Verizon loves double-billing so much for cell service that they want to do the same with the internet.

There are other countries that bill for incoming calls. I know of at least Singapore that does it.

Also, your phone provider does get charged for each incoming call. They just eat/redistribute that cost, since for normal phone user it's likely to be less than a penny per month. But try running a conference service and you're definitely going to get billed for incoming calls (apart from some weird force-subsidised areas where you can get paid to receive calls)

The difference is that in Singapore, you can get charged for incoming calls depending on your contract, but you _don't_ get charged for incoming SMS.

From a Singaporean perspective, that's the most bizarre part of mobile service in the US. I need to get an unlimited texting plan so that I don't get billed for people sending me texts? Whoa!

In India, when we were younger, we'd sometimes all call someone on their birthday. Before you know it, there'd be eight people at a time (with people dropping in and out to wish) on a conference call held at the birthday person's number. That person would pay nothing for this.

I'm pretty sure you can still do this.

Well, that is a damned strange US custom that isn't the case in many other places. It is certainly not the case here in Europe, for example. The receiver pays.

Don't you mean caller pays? Otherwise I could make someone else spend money just by calling them.

Caller pays, indeed.

No one pays for incoming calls in India. This is one of the reasons why even very poor have cell phones. Unfortunately american cell phone users aren't that lucky. Both the caller and callee have to pay. Verizon being cell phone company probably want to charge both sides. Most likely they will win.

This is a very bad analogy. When you sign up for mobile phone service, you're also agreeing to usage fees or paying extra to get "unlimited", which case, you pay nothing for those calls.

When I sign up with an internet provider, I am agreeing to pay a fee for open access to the internet at large. I'm not signing up to pay for each piece of content I access or each site I connect to.

I've never agreed, to the best of my knowledge to pay for access only to content served at a rate limited by the reverse utilization of the peering connection that content provider's content can be accessed across.

To use your own analogy -- it would be as-if your phone provider charged you to call me (they do), my phone provider charged me to receive the call (they do), then my phone provider charged you for making the call (they don't).

Actually, they do (on that last point). Which is why Google Voice won't route calls to certain numbers. It's called a termination fee, which works like this: I pay my local phone company, and also pay a long distance carrier. When I call you, your local phone company charges the long distance carrier a fee, which that carrier then passes on to me. (Well, it used to work this way, but almost everything is flat rate now).

In UK when Ann calls Bob it is Ann who pays for the call. Bob doesn't pay anything. When Bob calls Ann it'll be Bob paying for the call.

Are you saying that in the US when Ann calls Bob that both Ann and Bob will be charged?

For POTS, only the caller gets charged.

If you are using a cell phone or a satellite phone, you pay for your connection to that network, whether or not you started the call.

You certainly don't make it so that grandma using her POTS has to pay for the guy with the more expensive connection. That is viewed as extremely unfair.

OTOH, using the cell network generally has free calling to anywhere in the lower 48. It's not the old physical wires that are the expensive part, it's maintaining and upgrading all the cell towers, and so people pay for that usage. Once you've paid to connect your call to the wired network, you can do whatever within very wide geographic borders.

It's actually a historical issue. In the US cellphones orginaly used standard POTS numbers while in other countries cellphones often had an easily distinguishable format. This means that in the US granny wouldn't know she was calling a cellphone so charging her extra would be an unpleasant suprise, while in other countries she knew and was thus implicitly accepting to pay the charge.

But if you answer on your land line you don't get billed by his mobile provider.