Amazon Finally Cracking Down On 3G Browsing Cap

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
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There’s a little-known stipulation in Amazon’s 3G browsing, available primarily on their e-ink devices. Ostensibly, downloading items over 3G is completely free but browsing the web using the device’s weird and slow experimental interface is capped at 50MB. Most users have never hit that cap and there haven’t been many reports of actual notifications.

That’s recently changed. One user of the Kindle Keyboard 3G noticed the message when he was browsing the web in Canada. He received a message that said he could only browse Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and the Kindle Store. Wi-Fi access was unaffected.

In the terms of use, Amazon notes:

The Experimental Web Browser is currently only available for some customers outside of the United States and may be limited to 50MB of browsing over 3G per month. This limit does not apply when customers are browsing over Wi-Fi.

This could be a reaction to folks tethering their Kindles, resulting in a tragedy of the commons effect where some users are using a piddling amount of data while others are blowing out Amazon’s allocations in a few hours.

via Digital Reader