It is pretty much impossible to construct a pricing plan for data service that will make power users happy. Data caps were crystal clear, but they are "gouging" because marginal bandwidth costs almost nothing. Fixed speed tiers are "false advertising" because sometimes the network is too congested to hit the advertised speed. The real issue is that companies are trying to achieve price discrimination, which benefits the average customer and the company at the expense of customers who use the product more intensively. It's like how Apple charges hundreds of dollars more for a few dollars worth of extra flash memory in an iPhone.
It's perfectly sensible to design the plan that way. I'm not complaining about the technical aspects, I'm complaining about the naming.
I don't really see the relevance of your second paragraph. Yes, people will complain regardless. That doesn't make false advertising OK. The real issue is that companies want to sell something they cannot provide.
There is no a priori limit at which you get throttled. If there is no congestion, you can exceed your limit and not get throttled. Even if you get throttled, you don't get cut off, just slowed down.
There's certainly more accurate ways to describe that than "unlimited" but I don't think it's particularly egregious compared to U.S. marketing in general.
Unlimited iPhone X
small print: Actually only can hold 256GB.
Yes, what all carriers are doing is lying. The corrupt telecommunication and advertising industries allow it lobby for it, and the US government allows it. Many other governments do not.
(Strictly speaking there is an asterisk, but it indicates that there are multiple versions of the hardware, unrelated to throttling.)
In any case, this is not quite analogous. There's a difference between "you can only achieve this speed sometimes" and "your plan is unlimited only if you don't pass the limit." It's not that "unlimited" is only true under specific conditions, it's that it's never true.
I don't understand the purpose of your comment. Even if there are worse things out there, so what?
I think advertising is bullshit in general. Yogurt commercials talking about probiotics and whatnot. But that's a much bigger debate, and I suspect we agree on that front. But if we define "false advertising" to exclude most U.S. advertising, I think it excludes Verizon's data plans as well. It's technically true because they don't cut you off after a certain number of MBs. That's all advertising has to be in the U.S.
(And as a practical matter, it's not even really misleading for the typical consumer. I've never looked at my bandwidth usage after switching to Verizon's "unlimited" plans, despite having very heavy cell phone users in my household. Even if I'm exceeding the soft limits, where I live I never run into congestion that would lead to throttling. The marketing accurately conveys that the typical consumer can stop worrying about overages. Which is a lot better than the promises made by yogurt commercials.)
I guess this is the confusion. My point is not that Verizon is doing something unusual and should be singled out for it. My point is that Verizon's behavior here is emblematic of how this country treats advertisers in general, and an "unlimited" plan with limits is just particularly obvious example of how we let companies lie to us.