T-Mobile CEO to digital rights group: ‘Who the f— are you?’

T-Mobile chief John Legere is publicly sparring with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), questioning the group’s funding sources and asking, “Who the f— are you?”

The spat involves T-Mobile’s Binge On program, which allows customers to stream video through certain video services without it counting against their data cap. Critics say the service caps the speed of streaming video, which can cause the loss of video quality, even for services that are not part of Binge On, like YouTube.

{mosads}The EFF said this week it believes that the program is throttling, or slowing, traffic to all video services and violating the concept of net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the Web should be treated in the same way. 

In a Twitter question-and-answer session with Legere, the EFF account asked whether Binge On “altered video streams or just limited the bandwidth allotted to them.” 

“It includes a proprietary technology, and what the technology does is not only detect the video stream but select the appropriate bit rate to optimize to the mobile device,” Legere said in a video. “That’s part A of my answer. Part B of my answer is, who the f— are you, anyway, EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble? And who pays you?”

He did not elaborate further, but later linked to an article questioning whether the group was too cozy with Google.

The group quickly asked its members to speak up in its defense.

“T-Mobile’s CEO is dying to know who EFF is. Friends, please tweet at @JohnLegere with the hashtag #WeAreEFF to enlighten him,” it wrote. 

Legere’s comments come on the same day he vigorously defended the program and called the critics of the Binge On program “jerks.”