AT&T charges at least $44 more per month for GigaPower plans if you opt out of web monitoring, and makes this pricing hard to discover
for a Price Natasha Singer / New York Times : AT&T's Offer: Share Your Data for Personalized Ads, or Pay More Tweets: Stacey Higginbotham / @gigastacey : I know you have giant net neutrality fish to fry @TomWheelerFCC and @GigiBSohnFCC but this isn't cool https://gigaom.com/... Michael Weinberg / @mweinbergpk : .@gigastacey digs even deeper into AT&T's crazy “pay us not to spy on you” fee https://gigaom.com/... Stacey Higginbotham / @gigastacey : I fact checked AT&T's $29 privacy fee and found it costs a lot more to hide your web surfing from Ma Bell. https://gigaom.com/... Elissa Shevinsky / @elissabeth : AT&T puts an explicit price on privacy: https://gigaom.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
AT&T's GigaPower fiber rollout has already been caught using location-based price discrimination: just weeks before this story, it launched gigabit service in parts of Cupertino at $110/month — $40 more than in markets where it faces Google Fiber. Now Stacey Higginbotham's follow-up reporting shows the same playbook applied to privacy itself, with the advertised "$29" opt-out fee actually costing subscribers far more once the plan structure is unpacked.
First-order effects
- GigaPower subscribers who decline web monitoring pay at least $44 more per month — a direct tax on privacy — while AT&T's burying of the differential makes comparison shopping nearly impossible.
- The reporting hands FCC figures like Chairman Wheeler and Gigi Sohn, both named in the coverage, a concrete exhibit for their open proceedings against broadband practices.
Second-order effects
- Verizon, which the related coverage shows was already positioned to exploit consumer data via supercookies under an impotent FCC, now has a template to copy: charge for the ad-free version rather than just track silently.
- The disclosure adds to AT&T's regulatory exposure alongside its later $100 million FCC fine for misleading unlimited-data plans, reinforcing a pattern of opaque consumer-facing pricing that invites enforcement action.
Third-order effects
- If data-monetization surcharges become standard, broadband shifts from selling bandwidth alone to selling two products — connectivity and escape from surveillance — with the poorest customers effectively subsidizing ads; the 2022 analysis showing carriers charging lower-income and least-white areas the same price for slower service suggests differential pricing by customer segment is a durable carrier behavior, not a one-off.
The trend: Broadband providers are converting subscriber behavioral data into a second revenue stream, with privacy becoming an upsell tier and regulators' willingness to police the practice determining how far it spreads.