Price discrimination for services is mostly legal

in_cahoots 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Imagine if it were Comcast instead of Claude. Comcast gives you 750GB of data a month. Now they decide that visiting HN 'counts' as 750GB and either shut you off or bill you extra. Is that price discrimination or changing the terms after the fact?

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ac29 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not a great example since using Anthropic subscriptions with third party applications was never allowed, they just didnt take steps to prevent it until recently.

	▲	rich_sasha an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As the top poster of this thread demoed, this is not about plugging Claude into OpenClaw, but basically the presence of "OpenClaw" string somewhere in the code.

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duped 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Depends. Comcast is able to charge you and a business for the same service at different rates. They have also tried to do exactly what you're talking about, where they bill differently based on the data being accessed (remember net neutrality?).

But that's a bad example, price discrimination for commodities is generally not legal, while discrimination for services is. Data is arguably a commodity (ianal, I'm not up to date on the law of this). "Tokens" are not.

In fact the law makes carve outs specifically for businesses that sell services to discriminate on price based exactly on how the service is used and by who. And they do it all the time.

Whether it's fair or not, up to you to decide as a consumer. If you don't like it don't pay for it.

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FireBeyond 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Look at the wedding industry. Get a bunch of quotes on floral work. Then get a bunch of quotes for the same work, but tell them the event is a wedding. Oh, hey, look, you're getting charged 30% or beyond extra.

(I am not a full-time wedding photographer, but have shot maybe 20 weddings, and heard of this multiple times.)