> Somewhere in the middle you have wireless ISPs offering free bandwidth to their users for use with popular services. Hard to get customers to see that as a bad thing, especially if they already use those services.
I was quite glad that the CRTC ruled against this practice in Canada. If telecoms want to run successful mobile television streaming businesses, they can start selling reasonable amounts of data with their plans.
People want bigger data plans more than they want Bell TV on their phones, so I think it got reasonable public support. Consumers groups widely applauded the ruling, at least.
> First-party services fall in a different category; quite aside from net neutrality, that raises potential antitrust concerns.
Anti-trust law in the US is only relevant if the company has a monopoly.
That's exactly why net neutrality is important, and anti-trust law does not suffice. Because two competing ISP's both charging netflix to get the data you are already paying for to you, are not a monopoly.
(Notwithstanding that where I live Comcast is basically the only broadband option -- I still don't believe they have ever been legally determined to be a monopoly (yet?))
I was quite glad that the CRTC ruled against this practice in Canada. If telecoms want to run successful mobile television streaming businesses, they can start selling reasonable amounts of data with their plans.
People want bigger data plans more than they want Bell TV on their phones, so I think it got reasonable public support. Consumers groups widely applauded the ruling, at least.