I agree that data should be data and having companies pay (or otherwise sign up to be exempted) should be considered anti-competitive in such a regulated industry. But that belief won't stop me from using the exemption until the minute the FCC requires otherwise.
My carrier (T-Mobile) exempts streaming music services. It doesn't charge for the exemption and any music service can sign up for it, but it's still against net neutrality principles. It's better than AT&T's method, but only by a little. However, when they started this, I was able to cut from an unlimited plan to just 1GB/mo, and never suffer overages.
Do I disagree with it? On principle, yes. But I'm going to keep disagreeing with it while simultaneously using it as a way to lower my bill while getting around silly and even more innovation-stifling (IMO) data caps and high price mobile broadband.
I don't have a problem with different types of content being treated differently. It's still a fair playing field for all providers of streaming music. I've always thought that carriers should be allowed to prioritize content based on it's type in order to keep their networks running optimally. The problem for me is when specific companies can be prioritized over others.
T-Mobile doesn't treat all music apps the same though. They only apply free streaming to their list of 27 app [1]. Depending on how fair they are to adding small companies to the list. this system is essentially prioritizing larger companies over smaller ones.
It's prioritizing companies that apply to be included with their program over the ones that did not apply. It's free and open to any legal provider. Out of those 27, I've only ever heard of 11, which goes to show that they're not prioritizing big companies over smaller companies.
I disagree with their policy in principle. In practice, I use the hell out of it. I frequently drive long distances (over an hour each way) streaming music from Spotify the entire way.
I would rather have no data cap the same way my home Internet connection has no data cap. I would rather they not make exemptions for music specifically, since that shows they don't need the caps in the first place. But as long as they offer it (and I used T-Mobile long before they announced it), I will use it to my advantage.
I'm whining about your phrasing. I wish people only used "principle" to describe very strongly held beliefs.
You are weighing your belief that 'data is data' against, basically, a trivial convenience (you have many options, among them: no music, downloaded music, cheap streaming violating the principle, expensive streaming respecting the principle). That action says something about how strongly you believe in 'data is data'.
If you want to talk about the phrasing, I think you're missing a subtle distinction.
He disagrees IN principle, not ON principle.
As in, he disagrees in principle, but not in practice. As I understand it, "on principle" is the construction describing taking a stand on a decision because of your deeply held convictions. "In principle" is for a decision you've derived logically from a set of abstract premises.
The first comment in the thread uses "on principle". The next one uses "in principle", but I think it is used there to describe a belief.
I could very well misunderstand, I don't know (or the usage above could be loose).
I guess part of my problem is that I have trouble with a construction like "In principle, I believe in the sanctity of human life. In practice, sometimes you have to execute bad people."
(I think) That's better expressed as a preference that people not be killed. It's a silly extreme example, but I'm having trouble seeing how else it would be used, in a mechanistic sense.
It's more of "my principles tell me that this policy is wrong. However, I don't have the ability to make it right or avoid using it. So until it's set right by someone who DOES have that power, I don't have a choice."
So to use your analogy, I believe in the sanctity of human life. But my government doesn't. I don't kill anyone, but I live in a country that does. The fact that my government kills people won't stop me from driving on the government-built roads.
However you want to word it, I disagree with T-Mobile and AT&T's net neutrality policies. But I'm not in a position of power to make them change that, so what can I do?
I really like T-Mobile's program since a lot of my data usage was disappearing into streaming music (namely Google Music/Play Music). However I will fully admit it is anti-competitive since if you're a new music streaming service just trying to make it, you won't get onto T-Mobile's free list (and even Google Music/Play Music wasn't until extremely recently, like even two months ago it wasn't).
However as much as I like and benefit from this program, I think the world would be a better place if all data was treated equally. I'd actually be willing to sacrifice this program if it meant a more fair internet, and I benefit from it...
Will you add more streaming providers over time?
Absolutely! Any lawful and licensed streaming music service can work with us for inclusion in this offer, which is designed to benefit all of our Simple Choice customers. And we want to hear from you! Who do you think we should add next? Vote at #MusicFreedom and be heard!
If you are a streaming service provider Click here, send us an email and we’ll get back to you to begin the process.
Doesn't make it any less anti-competitive, I think, but it feels nice to see this kind of promise.
I honestly wrote that "anti-competitive" bit so it wouldn't look like I was defending anyone. You caught me trying to preempt being called a shill. It didn't work.
I hope you didn't think I was calling you a shill - I literally changed my Spotify settings after I read about T-Mobile's policy in this article. Re-reading, my post could have been read differently. Sorry!
If so, then why do you need a throwaway account to side with the Telcos? The issue is once this becomes standard practice those nice words disappear and a whole new monster appears. Its best to nip it in the bud.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'll say it with a non-throwaway account: T-Mobile has said they're willing to work with any legal streaming music provider, as stated on their website.
I'm not sure why you would think someone would need a throwaway for that, or why you need to imply someone is a shill for simply reading T-Mobile's website.
The difference is that (in theory at least) there's no discrimination for or against specific music streaming services. This is unlike the zero-rating described in the article, where specific social networks (and one specific encyclopedia) are unfairly prioritized over others.
If AT&T were to, say, exempt all social networking sites or all encyclopedic wikis or something to that effect, then I wouldn't be nearly as opposed to it.
Granted, as a happy T-Mobile customer who has put the free music streaming to good use, I'm probably biased in favor of that variety of selective discounting. However, I'd be opposed to it if, say, only Pandora was allowed or only Amazon Prime Music was allowed or somesuch.
Music Freedom is a little different, at least in theory. Theory is always cleaner than reality so let's start there.
In theory, Music Freedom is a way to have all streaming music traffic not count toward your data cap. If that's the case, T-Mobile is discriminating based on the type of traffic, but not the origin of the traffic. Generally speaking, network management and traffic shaping aren't being fought against by net neutrality campaigners. It makes sense that VoIP traffic receive higher priority than FTP because if my FTP transfer takes another 10 seconds out of 5 minutes I'll hardly notice, but if my voice traffic stutters, I will certainly notice.
In many ways, Music Freedom is an extension of this to bandwidth caps. Streaming music is low, consistent bandwidth usage, but not real-time. By contrast, loading things on the web is high bandwidth usage, but quite spiky. As a carrier and as a user, it would make sense to reschedule music packets around web packets. If the next 15 seconds of the song are already in your local buffer, you'd much rather it wait until you're idle in your browsing session than slow down your browsing - so long as the next second of music is delivered less than 15 seconds from now.
If T-Mobile were simply managing its network this way, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. Music lovers wouldn't notice that things were being scheduled for more idle times in the network and web users would see faster speeds. That's simply an equal or better outcome for everyone.
Traffic shaping is a good thing. My university has a wonderfully progressive IT department and didn't want to block anything. However, out of 5,000 users, the top 50 users use half the bandwidth. Again, the university doesn't mind that. Most of the time it doesn't matter. However, they didn't want students trying to do research to have their relatively low-bandwidth web traffic stifled by students file sharing and so web traffic was given greater priority than file sharing. The university didn't want to block file sharing, but I think a lot of people would recognize that large file transfers are not as time-sensitive as interactive processes.
Some people suggest that all data be treated the same. I don't think that's the answer. Some traffic needs more real-time guarantees than others. That's very different from discriminating based on the source/destination of the traffic.
But T-Mobile is applying this to data caps (or throttling points). I'm going to argue that (on an intelligently designed system) using 1GB of streaming music is less network usage than downloading a 1GB file. What do I mean by less network usage? I mean that the streaming music usage impacts other users on the same connection less. For a simple example, let's say that you're browsing the web and I'm streaming 256kbps music over a 512kbps connection. Are we both using half of the connection? No. When browsing the web, you have peaks and valleys in your data transmission. To make things simple, let's say that every time you click a link you download 64KB or 512kbits. If I'm using half the connection, it takes 2 seconds for you to download. But that's not very efficient. I already have the next few seconds of the song in my buffer so it makes more sense for me to drop down to 0kbps for a second, you to complete your download in 1 second, and then for me to download 2 seconds of song in the second after your download completes. I have not seen any degradation of my service - I'm oblivious to it happening. Downloading the song faster doesn't help me, but you downloading your web page faster does help you.
So, by being able to reschedule streaming music around other traffic, it actually uses less of the network capacity during the periods when there is contention. In total, it uses the same amount in terms of MB or GB transferred. However, you don't care how much of the connection I'm using when you're not using it. You only care how much I'm using while you want your downloads to go faster. If I were only using traffic during the valleys of your transmissions, it would be like I was never using the connection from your perspective. So, me streaming music affects you less because we know that we can reschedule things within certain bounds.
There's a bit of a disconnect between pricing and usage. If you're using the network at 3am, your data usage probably isn't significant. Netflix refills its content caching boxes during times where network traffic is more idle because it isn't just about bytes transferred, but whether other people are trying to use the link's capacity at the same time you are. However, coming up with a pricing model that accurately models one's usage of a link's capacity as a function of contesting for that capacity from other users would be hard to come up with. Again, if I'm sharing a link with 100 other people and agree only to use the link when no one else wants to (ie, they aren't sending/receiving packets), then I'm never contesting anyone else for link capacity. By the way, I'm not saying that's a practical standpoint, just an illustrative thing.
If 1GB of streaming music is actually using up less of the network, why should it be charged the same? GBs of transfer is really just a proxy for what is actually cared about. In many cases, it's reasonable. We can't tell if you care whether that web page loads as fast as possible or whether that FTP transfer takes an additional minute or not. But we can say (with reasonably high confidence) that you don't care if the 30th second of a song arrives within 5 seconds of the transfer starting or 20 seconds of the transfer starting. As such, it's possible that we can reschedule streaming music in such a way that it's basically not using the network - at least not at times when other users care. Network capacity used when there's excess capacity other users don't want isn't really network capacity that's being used. It's simply filling what would be dead space.
If bandwidth caps/charges are supposed to make sure that high users pay for the capacity increases they necessitate or make sure that they don't crowd out smaller users, then shouldn't usage that might be high in GBs transferred, but is actually not requiring capacity increases or harming other users get a bit of an exemption?
Now, in practice, T-Mobile doesn't support all providers and that is concerning. It would be nice if they posted an explanation of their criteria rather than just saying "email us if you're on the inside". Likewise, it being free rather than a discounted rate based on how much it impacts can be concerning. Others can talk about the practice and the issues there because this comment is already too long.
tl;dr: GBs transferred is not exactly equal to network usage. Streaming music can actually use less of a network link's capacity than GBs transferred would make it seem because it can be rescheduled for times when the network is seeing less traffic and, therefore, not impacting users.
Well, the flip side is, why does only music get this benefit? What if I didn't care if my 50mb download takes 10 times as long? Wouldn't it then fall under the same kind of "using dead time" thing?
All t-mobile plans that qualify for free music streaming are "unlimited" in that after you reach your data allotment it does just that -- cuts bandwidth by an order of magnitude. Its entirely possible that it works the same way as is suggested above.
In the article the comparison of everyone sharing the same road infrastructure is given. Why is the analogy not carried over to public transportation? There are plenty of people who are willing to pay a much lower cost per trip by riding public transportation instead of driving (or even owning) a car. Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers.
In fact, the author even states that people could be satisfied by this approach. If people are satisfied with their walled garden, why is this an issue?
The analogy is off. Bus vs. car riding on the road is equivalent to the packets which ride on top of the underlying internet infrastructure. That some people group their information into the same packet (a bus) vs. dedicating the packet to themselves (a car) isn't relevant to the discussion around why the cost of transporting the packet is based on the destination.
Imagine if all the roads were toll roads. Regardless of whether you take a bus, car, taxi, bicycle, etc. the toll is waived if you're traveling to McDonald's whereas you have to pay the toll if you're traveling to Burger King. Shouldn't it be like electricity where you pay per kilowatt-hour regardless of the use? Or should powering, say, Sony devices cost you nothing but you get charged for powering other devices?
That doesn't make sense in this context though - the analogy breaks down.
The reason why regulation is useful is because unregulated companies collude, form monopolies, fix prices, and eventually kill innovation and prey on their customers. Regulation is a useful tool to provide an even playing field.
Sure, customers may be satisfied with a walled garden now, but how did facebook / twitter / netflix flourish? Using unbiased network traffic. We shouldn't shut the door on new startups.
I see what you mean: Public transportation can be welfare-enhancing when there is enough regularity of travel between certain (networks of) points that throughput is increased when e.g. a lane is converted from road to light rail. The benefits of higher throughput would exceed the opportunity cost of the space being usable for fewer routes.
(tl;dr: it pays to bus people if they're all going between the same points.)
In that sense, if some major sites can exploit the regularity of the traffic they get to the point that they produce less load on the network per bit transmitted, that it's (not un)reasonable that the user be billed less for that site, though "free" is still questionable.
We should be careful to distinguish "bribing ISP for preferential access" vs "accounting for the reality of the cheaper carriage of one site's data".
(tl;dr: cheaper data rates can reflect corruption or legitimately lower access cost, and our reaction should reflect that.)
The comparison doesn't make sense. There are no fees to drive on the road so my car and the bus are on equal terms. Even if there was a fee, and riding on a bus makes me exempt, that's still not a close analogy.
A better analogy is a situation where there are competing private bus companies, there's a road fee per user (paid by the user), and the city exempts users of its preferred bus company. In that situation, all other private bus companies are at a huge competitive disadvantage because their users are still required to pay the fee.
Private shared transportation does not have nearly the same incumbent advantage. Anyone can build or buy a bus, and move people around. There is not Facebook to pay lots of money to ensure that competitors are locked out of providing a similar service.
Moreover, users actually get meaningful choices when it comes to which car or bus to take. ISPs are more like roads, a utility where the options (in many places) are very limited.
I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia. Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site. It's strange to claim that Wikipedia is being anti-competitive. Personally, I think Wikipedia Zero is a great program.
The article also says:
> The reason that the Chinese, Russian and Cuban governments fear an open Internet more than anything else is that it allows users to gather and speak to one another. But users of a walled-garden “zero-rated” Internet can’t even click links that go outside the garden.
It's true that users can't go out of the sites they have free access to. But services like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp do allow people to "gather and speak to one another". In fact, Twitter and Facebook were prominent in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.
> I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.
but that's not the point, is it? what if I wanted to launch a competitor? the fact Wikipedia is non-profit shouldn't grant it some kind of super status above my business idea. non-profit doesn't automatically mean better or less evil for consumers.
> I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.
I'm sure TVTropers resent that remark ;)
> Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site.
Sure it does. You can't possibly tell me that you haven't noticed all the popups begging for money every year around the holidays. The more eyes on the site - and therefore the more eyes on those donation boxes - the more potential donations, and therefore the more money.
Being a non-profit doesn't mean there isn't competition involved.
I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.
Any other encyclopedia and any wiki-formatted knowledge store could be considered close competition. Wikipedia's in the business of providing high-level (and often low) level information, and there are tons of players in that space - just perhaps not as generalized and overreaching.
Wikipedia is a non-profit. They don't really make more money by having more people use the site
Which doesn't mean that it can't compete with other entities, just that it does so under a special set of rules. It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.
> It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.
That interest is clearly not "making more money". Can you explicitly explain what those interests are? I may be naive in believing that Wikipedia's goal is "making all the world's information freely available to everyone". But if they have some other ulterior motive for expansion, I would like to know what that is.
At the very least, each of their employees' has a selfish reason to keep Wikipedia the de-facto encyclopedia. For instance, they have over $20 million in salary they need to pay every year and without traffic, they lose donations (over $45 million a year) and therefore could lose their jobs. Seems a monopoly would be in their interest.
The biggest competitors in a case like this you can't see, because they don't exist. It's all the competing products that were never created because the barriers to entry were too high.
> It's all the competing products that were never created because the barriers to entry were too high.
Are you claiming that they weren't created because of Wikipedia? If you do have evidence of that, then indeed Wikipedia was being anti-competitive. Otherwise, simply because no competition ever popped up, doesn't mean that it's Wikipedia's fault.
While I strongly agree in net-neutrality principles, there is the case that in these scenarios the data may not have the same costs to provide, and some may be cheap enough that it doesn't make sense to charge from.
In Australia at least general internet transit is orders of magnitude more expensive then a local peering connection. If the content provider is making the content cheaper then the general internet traffic, then it seems quite reasonable for that saving to be passed on to the customer.
While I love the abstraction that you simply pay a fixed rate per bit/byte, it doesn't accurately portray the connectivity situation at least in Australia, where international transit, and even inter-capital city transit can be a sizeable portion of any costs.
I pay rough costs of $2000 per month for a 100 Mbit / 5TB per month service to my rack in a DC, but I can pay $750 per month for a 10gbit service to a peering (IX) Internet Exchange in the same DC. If I was providing an ISP service I think it would be completely reasonable to not charge for traffic over the peering link as the data is nearly 300x cheaper, its quite possible it would be cheaper to simply not track the usage.
It does create a situation where competition is harder, where a content provider may need to deploy many POPs to ensure their content is available under a peering situation, however I don't see this is inherently anti-competitive.
It's funny that when Netflix has to pay for preferential treatment, it's a bad thing ("my bill might go up!"); but when it's Spotify getting unlimited data, it's a good thing ("my bill might go down!"). You can't eat your cake and have it too.
Yes, I agree with the article. I'm saying that people in general (even in this topic) seem to not mind the issue when it's personally advantageous to them. (if that weren't the case, the article would merely be stating the obvious and not be newsworthy.)
And I'll admit that unlimited streaming music does sound nice. But net neutrality is important to me, and so it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss it when it benefits me.
I think that few people believe that Netflix should receive preferential treatment for free; rather, the net neutrality issue is that Netflix could be required to pay for whatever carriage it receives, or else receive intentionally degraded service.
Coming from a place where this practice is banned, I wonder how they implement this. Traffic going to certain IPs or IP ranges is exempted? They mention WhatsApp and Twitter, and the first thing that comes to mind is using them as proxies to tunnel through. I don't think it would be against ToS either - you're just asking someone else on the "other side" of those services to access the 'net and get the information for you, and it shouldn't matter one bit if you're speaking English or TCP/IP. :-)
(There's plenty of info on the internet about wanting to use these services while behind a proxy, but seemingly none on using them as a proxy...)
My mobile contract in the UK is $20 per month for 1000Gb on 4G with tethering permitted, 5000 voice minutes to the same carrier, 2000 voice minutes to any other carrier and 5000 text messages.
I'm in the UK and get nowhere near that for a similar price, who are you with?
I've just checked and the recurring charge I pay gets:
£12 goodybag: will include UK 3GB, 500 minutes, unlimited texts (was 250 minutes, unlimited data)
So thanks to your post I've just discovered I'm no longer getting the service I thought I was! It seems they sent a "changes to your service" email which I didn't read because I assumed it was ToS changes.
Exactly. I thought this article dealed with a very specific problem in a very specific geographic region.
I’m talking about the issue of “zero rating”: the practice being followed by mobile carriers around the world to provide Web access “for free” to their users to certain chosen services.
But all other OECD countries have some flavor of zero rating in place.
I've never heard of a UK or European carrier implementing "zero rating" services, so I'm not sure how far around the world this occurs and the only concrete examples given are in the US.
I'm with a dinky little PAYG plan in Austria at the moment, and I just pay EUR3.95 for 1GB as I need it, which I never seem to use very fast because the majority of the time I'm connected via WiFi. Even when I was moving house in the UK and tethered my phone, I think I only used about 6GB in the course of a month. Of course I was slightly careful with video streaming and other data heavy activities, but I didn't really restrict my Internet use.
Anyway, my point is, "zero rating" even if it did occur would have very little relevance when data is so cheap anyway. It seems to me that the root of the problem is overpriced data, and not the "zero rating" of some services.
Edit: As for voice and text. I use Telegram for all my heavy "texting" and a SIP provider for all calls. I think my total monthly mobile telephony bill is only about EUR10 with the Austrian PAYG plan and another $10 with the SIP provider.
I used to have massive mobile phone bills, sometimes in excess of £100 per month (average around £70), when I lived in the UK and traveled around Europe a lot. This was all down to charges while abroad, and apart from not accept incoming calls, there wasn't a lot I could do about it if I wanted to continue operating my business.
> I've never heard of a UK or European carrier implementing "zero rating" services, so I'm now sure how far around the world this occurs and the only concrete examples given are in the US.
Historically it has happened in the UK. For example, "daily passes" of data coming with unlimited Facebook (on O2 PayG I believe) and some streaming music all over the place (Orange pre-EE, Virgin, et al).
I don't see anyone doing it currently as frankly data prices have become so inexpensive that it isn't as interesting of an offering. The UK is largely about price wars right now, who can offer the cheapest service. The gimmicks have mostly fallen by the wayside.
I'm talking back when 150 MB was a "lot" of data and 1 GB was over £35/month with a 12 month contract).
> It seems to me that the root of the problem is overpriced data, and not the "zero rating" of some services.
Zero rating facilitates overpriced data, which in turn incentivizes users to stay within the discount/zero web. Without zero rating, a broad consumer base will demand reasonable data rates, encouraging carriers to compete.
If this is the case, and as @Someone1234 recalls the UK used to have zero rating services (I honestly don't remember them), what changed in that landscape to bring data prices to significantly lower points? Surely not just competition on its own. The US mobile market isn't a monopoly (although I stand to be corrected if this is spoken in ignorance).
There's a tethering nag? I'm not paying for tethering either, but I'm still able to do it without T-Mobile yelling at me (as I've had to do several times due to network issues with my ISP).
Since when has sweetening your offerings been viewed as anti-competitive? That's all "data sponsoring" is; making your product more compelling through the use of cash. Is using money to make your product attractive now anti-trust?
I flipped through Wiki for a refresher, just to make sure.
It might be truly anti-competitive "ladder-up-behind-you" if all app devs were forced to sponsor client-side traffic. Think of taxi tokens- a fixed barrier to entry.
But even then, to be an anti-competitive barrier to entry it must also be high. The cost of a postage stamp on your government paperwork is a barrier to entry, but it is not anti-competitive.
To me, its similar to a supermarket only allowing already-popular brands to be on their shelves. From their POV I guess it makes sense, but if you're out there selling a new brand of peanut butter, you can either start your own supermarket, or target the mom-pop stores and hope for the best.
I think this kind of stuff is highly regressive. The Internet was this place where you succeeded on your own merit and not because you pay-to-win. A place where a tiny company like Google was able to sell their service because it was on the same playing field as lycos/yahoo/altavista. If accessing Google cost you money while lycos/yahoo/altavista were free, nobody would have ever tried Google. And without enough people searching and clicking on links there will never be enough seed data for a good ranking algorithm to work.
The supermarket is a good example. That's already how it is, all the time, and yet we still get incumbents. Have you seen how many different kinds of jams, jellies, and peanut butters have taken hold? Yes, it's a challenge to be the new guy on the block, but that is just the nature of the beast. Now, if Jiffy paid supermarkets not to stock other brands of peanut butter, that would probably be anti-competitive.
If accessing Google cost you money while lycos/yahoo/altavista were free, nobody would have ever tried Google.
We can't know for sure, but IMO this is totally not true. The cost for one search worth of traffic is tiny, and their results were superior.
I always wondered this as well. If a company was sponsoring data on a product that they don't make any money from, that looks like it could be considered anti-competitive.
If a company sponsored data on search so they could fill the results with ads for their products maybe?
Or if a streaming service sponsored data so they could get people to buy from their music store or something?
If the data is sponsored using funds from the profits of the sponsoring service, I can't imagine how that could be construed as anti-competitive. Presumably the competition could do the same thing unless there's some sort of exclusivity deal.
There is a competitive advantage to being a bigger company with more money to throw around, but does that make it anti-competitive?
If all apps had equal access to zero rating, then that'd be one thing. If I can just go to some site and pay for traffic to my site, cool. But is that reality?
On top of that, I would be surprised if some carriers are not just doing it as a marketing service. In Guatemala, I see huge billboards saying you don't need to pay anything to use Facebook, Whatsapp and some others. If you have an active line (meaning you've spent a dollar in a month or two or something low), you're set to use them.
Even promotion like that is somewhat anticompetitive if there's no way for other parties to let users know.
I'm surprised this discussion didn't come up when FB acquired Whatsapp. IMHO, zero rating explains a significant chunk of Whatsapp's $19B price tag. Zero Rating is a valuable moat, and makes Whatsapp that much harder to unseat by rival apps. Also zero rating is particularly common in the countries that Whatsapp dominates.
On the similar note, the NFL app on my android, which was installed without permission and cannot be deleted, sends 10s of megabytes of data to Verizon even though I've never opened it once. What it's sending, I don't know, and it's using up my data plan for no reason.
Though I agree that in many situations it is anti-competitive, I think it would be difficult to tell someone who has a small data to work with that you're going to take away their currently free access to Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.
So don't. Facebook and Wikipedia don't require a huge amount of bandwidth, that's how they can be free. Just stop discriminating. Give people a mode they can switch on where they don't get charged for data but get capped at 0.5Mbps.
This is my preference. I think the only reason T-Mobile offers unlimited music streaming is that it typically consumes <= 256 kbps. I would much rather they offered an "economy mode" switch where I could throttle my entire device and browse whatever I wanted.
T-Mobile offers unlimited music streaming because it is marketable. They are a third-wheel carrier, so they are hustling hard in search of a way to differentiate themselves, and "Unlimited Music" is going to be a much more successful ad campaign than "Unlimited 256kbps Browsing"
This article seems to equate two things – that which is true today, and that which the writer imagines for the future. The future is not fact.
The fact of zero rating is that it is beneficial to consumers, and progressive – the poorer one is, the more zero-rating is likely to help. That is factual, observable, measurable.
The speculation is a slippery-slope argument, and not factual. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but simply that it’s a priori.
Zero-rating is free shipping. I don’t know of anyone that considers free shipping anti-competitive, though one could make the same argument.
> Zero-rating is free shipping. I don’t know of anyone that considers free shipping anti-competitive, though one could make the same argument.
That's a bad analogy. A better analogy would be USPS[0] providing certain shippers with free shipping, and not others[1]. Imagine the disastrous effects this would have on small sellers, who would certainly not have the means to negotiate these rates with USPS, whereas a larger company would.
So it's not a slippery slope, because the anti-competitive impact is direct and immediate. USPS has to charge everyone the same price for the same service, and for good reason.
[0] Like broadband ISPs, USPS has an effective monopoly on shipping in parts of the country, as private carriers (UPS/FedEx) will simply "offload" certain deliveries to them, as USPS is required to ship to all locations.
[1] USPS does offer, for example, "Media mail" discounts, but this is available to all shippers, and represents a different service (slower delivery, no guaranteed dates - in the olden days, it represented surface shipping, though I'm not sure that is the case anymore).
UPS does actually do something like this. If you buy a UPS label online without an account, you pay what's called "list price," which is the full advertised price for shipping. However, if you're a shipper with an account, UPS will discount your shipping below list price if you do a lot of business with them. I've seen up to a 20% discount for parcels shipped UPS Ground on a small company's account.
I don't have any data on this, but I suspect that some combination of the list price discount and some special contractual arrangements are what allow Amazon to offer services such as Prime for such a low price. List price for a 1 lb next day air shipment were on the order of $50.00 last time I shipped anything.
It seems more akin to USPS providing discounted rates for books in Media Mail and Library Mail (the T-Mobile way of discounting any streaming service without charge, at least)
As long as traffic priorities are applied to _classes_ of traffic which don't directly benefit a provider's service over competitors, I don't have a problem with it and don't think it violates the spirit of what network neutrality is supposed to be about.
It's also important that it's a positive benefit, not a restriction.
It depends a bit on whether companies like Facebook are paying for this, and if they're paying a reasonable rate. My guess would be that they're paying something.
The real problem re: network neutrality is a lack of competition and enforced monopolies. Open the last mile (and wireless) to more competition and you eliminate the worst network neutrality case scenarios.
I don't think it's a slippery slope arguement at all.
Zero rating is anti-competitive. I don't think that can be argued.
What can be argued to to what degree it is harmful to the consumer.
Anti-competitive business models can be beneficial to end users in the short term (e.g. selling at a loss to drive out competition and build a monopoly) but are pretty much exclusively detrimental in the long term.
>The speculation is a slippery-slope argument, and not factual.
You don't need a slippery-slope argument, the immediate effects are anti-competitive. It adds a barrier to entry where in order to offer a service to a mobile user (with a data cap), you need to pay the carrier. It's like bribing a local official so that you can use the roads to make a delivery.
Why shouldn't something like Wikipedia that is relatively easy for a carrier to cache locally be charged differently than something for which providing access requires inter-carrier agreements?
It's just an extension of not paying per use of jquery mobile because there's a copy cached on my phone. It's congestion pricing.
A lot of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. can be localized. People 'Like' button local businesses live near their friends, they mostly follow people who produce lots of content, they search for local and regional businesses.
Caching is a real business case for 'personalizing experiences'. I don't get a lot of Australian news in my searches. Instead, I get my probable biases confirmed. Twitter encourages me to follow my local handegg team. Facebook trickles my more geographically distant friends and family into my feed.
The common denominator is part of the algorithm and its just not worth the bandwidth to serve the long tail.
Perhaps next Professor Crawford will want to outlaw freemium pricing for web services. Or free web email. Or free over-the-air TV and radio. Or free urban newsweeklies.
In the days before regulation, there was so much competition it wasn't even funny! Oh wait, there was only one phone company: AT&T. Then they were broken up and the industry became a little more heavily regulated and suddenly there was finally some competition.
Regulation doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It happens because bad things were happening before the regulations were put in place.
Based on some quick Wikipedia reading, it was a patent-based monopoly from 1876 to 1894, then "the telephone market opened to competition and 6,000 new telephone carriers started while the Bell Telephone company took a significant financial downturn" until 1907 when AT&T bought out most competitors. Then in 1913 AT&T became a government-regulated monopoly until 1984 when it was broken up by the government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System So the relationship between regulation and competition isn't all that clear.
A clear analog for this issue is television. I do not know, but was there ever such contention over OTA programming vs cable networks?
I view these proposals as very competitive - among mobile carriers, where we see much less competition (in the US at least) than we do among app developers.
It always seems curious to me that those who advocate most strongly to keep the government out of the content of the internet is also most vocal in advocating to get the government into regulation of the means of access. The two are not easily separable.
You mean that the people most vocal against the government deciding what they can read are also the most vocal against a corporation deciding what they can read?
You are right, those two are not easily separable.
Zero-rating is not the same as censorship. A corporation cannot prevent any individual from taking an action that individual wants to. A government can, if not make impossible, make very costly that same reading.
I would much rather have to pay extra for the internet, than trust any government, to benevolently regulate access to the internet. If the government regulates my access, then a corporation much larger than I can lobby quite effectively for regulatory change that I would not like.
If a corporation restricts what I can access (and that is not what is happening here - they are merely charging a different rate), then I have multiple options to choose from. I can cheaply break a contract with a corporation. I cannot cheaply break a contract with my government.
There is a qualitative difference to appreciate here. With corporations it is "What I want costs $50 extra a month." With a government, it can be "What I want sits behind the Great Firewall, and I may go to jail for consuming it."
I am not suggesting that the US government may turn into the Chinese. I am suggesting that the US government does some pretty shady things, and that regulatory capture is real, and worse for consumers, than firms competing by trying to offer me free things.
Please show your work on how you get from the facts of the matter, those being:
1) There is more than one mobile provider
2) Multiple of these providers are independently considering implementing zero-rating
3) Zero-rating is providing a service for free (no matter how limited)
4) Companies only give things away for free when they are seeking to maintain or increase their customer base
To the conclusion that we see a monopoly in mobile providers.
My carrier (T-Mobile) exempts streaming music services. It doesn't charge for the exemption and any music service can sign up for it, but it's still against net neutrality principles. It's better than AT&T's method, but only by a little. However, when they started this, I was able to cut from an unlimited plan to just 1GB/mo, and never suffer overages.
Do I disagree with it? On principle, yes. But I'm going to keep disagreeing with it while simultaneously using it as a way to lower my bill while getting around silly and even more innovation-stifling (IMO) data caps and high price mobile broadband.