Or alternatively, customers can pay an extra $X per month to get unlimited food from the most popular vendors. But now other vendors are suffering because no-one wants to pay for them when they've already paid for their free pass to the popular ones.
Net neutrality isn't always charging more for things. Often it's more like "all our mobile plans come with UNLIMITED data for Facebook and YouTube." Which actually seems nice for consumers but hurts any other site trying to inhabit the same space.
That's a key question - if dropping NN benefited just the titans, that would certainly be stifling the competition. But is it?
The most infamous example in the US is TMobile's Binge On, which has a pretty big list of participating services [1] including even a few porn sites. I just don't see evidence that this is tilting things further towards entrenched powers (yet).
If I had T-Mobile I would definitely take advantage of zero-rated streaming. Naturally this service is influencing people's choices about what sites to visit and 'binge on' when they have down time. Evidence of this can be gleaned from the reviews from content providers that have gotten themselves onto T-Mobile's Binge-On list...
What Binge On providers
are saying. Many of the
smaller video providers
rave about Binge On and
what it means for their
business:
Since joining Binge On,
we’ve seen twice the
flow of new T-Mobile
customers coming to the
app and spending twice
as long than customers
of the carriers.”
-- David Moffly,
CEO, Baeble Media
Sure, it's great for those who decide to opt-in to T-Mobile's terms. And of course it's free... for now. To me it seems suspiciously similar to a silicon valley-type tactic: offer something that clearly has value, but oddly charge nothing, act like of course it'll always be free, and wait patiently as they flock to your platform.
Of course there is always a catch. I was interested in what that catch currently looks like, since it will never be more mild than now. I've facetiously paraphrased it for ya'll (if you'd rather read the policy first hand, without the snark, I've linked it below)...
--------------------
Binge-On Content Provider Policy and Technical Criteria
To be included, a content provider's video delivery will meet the following requirements:
A. [Allow us to identify and monitor your content, and we will help you degrade its quality, otherwise we'll make our best effort to degrade it for you lol]. Use of technology protocols which make detection of video difficult such as https and UDP require additional collaboration with T‐Mobile to enable the video detection.
B. [Any decisions to change the way you deliver video must flow through us.]. T-Mobile reserves the right to suspend the content provider’s participation in Binge On
C. [Your video content is all we want. You're a video streaming service, just stay a video streaming service. If you try to deliver other content, we will count that against our customers data cap].
D.The network caps the bandwidth to detectable videos to 1.5 Mbps and as a result, many video services will deliver videos at lower resolutions that will look good on mobile devices, typically 480p
F. T-Mobile reserves the right to [degrade] your content in the event of consistent failure to [degrade your own] content within our guidelines
[Lastly, for those that want to opt-out, fine. Just... keep in mind our customers have Bing-On switched on basically always, so that all content delivered to them is under 1.5 Mbps ~480p. If your company can't deal with that for technical reasons, you must OPT-IN to OPT-OUT, per se. That is, we need to identify and monitor your content (ie. stop using https) so we know not to throttle the content when our customers are using Binge-On (aka all our customers, always).
Net neutrality isn't always charging more for things. Often it's more like "all our mobile plans come with UNLIMITED data for Facebook and YouTube." Which actually seems nice for consumers but hurts any other site trying to inhabit the same space.