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.
(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?