FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth argued against the ruling and refused to participate, saying that it puts at "legal risk the long-standing FCC rule that prohibits local phone companies from charging ISPs per minute fees for access charges".
Members pay only a per-minute fee for the rental, and can park free in legal parking spaces in Washington and other participating cities. Car2go also lets members leave the car nearly anywhere in the city it is rented in.
Operators collect a per-minute fee for WAP usage, and some of them pay content providers to produce material to encourage traffic, but there is no virtuous circle of the i-mode sort.
They charge customers a monthly fee of $7 to $10 to gain access to data services and then a per-minute fee for each minute spent surfing or talking, with a set number included with the monthly service plan.
Some charge a per-connection fee as well as a per-minute fee (for example, a call with AT&T's USADirect plan and its calling card incurs an 89-cents-a-call surcharge) If you make a lot of short calls, the per-connection fees can add up quickly.
There is no extra charge to the callers, but the passenger will pay a per-minute fee of $8 for incoming calls and $9 for outgoing calls.
European Internet usage lags behind that of the United States because consumers pay per-minute fees for telephone-line connections, which makes the cost of getting online quite high, he said.
The alternative are no cap plans for similar amounts, with less allowance included but cheaper per minute fees.
Viber typically charges a per-minute fee, which could be paid for via a calling plan or by purchasing credit to pay as you go.
The 15-minute appointment standard in fee-for-service medicine — which pays doctors according to how many patients they see and treatments they provide — makes it unlikely that doctors will spend time discussing a patient's life in any detail.
"This is a minute fraction of the 2.3 million fee-for-service beneficiaries residing in the nine competitively bid metropolitan areas for 2011," Mr. Blum said.
