Europe's Top Court Says Net Neutrality Rules Bar 'Zero Rating' (techcrunch.com) 81
The European Union's top court has handed down its first decision on the bloc's net neutrality rules -- interpreting the law as precluding the use of commercial 'zero rating' by Internet services providers. TechCrunch reports: 'Zero rating' refers to the practice of ISPs offering certain apps/services 'tariff free' by excluding their data consumption. It's controversial because it can have the effect of penalizing and/or blocking the use of non-zero-rated apps/services, which may be inaccessible while the zero rated apps/services are not -- which in turn undermines the principal of net neutrality with its promise of fair competition via an equal and level playing field for all things digital. The pan-EU net neutrality regulation came into force in 2016 amid much controversy over concerns it would undermine rather than bolster a level playing field online. So the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU)'s first ruling interpreting the regulation is an important moment for regional digital rights watchers.
A Budapest court hearing two actions against Telenor, related to two of its 'zero rating' packages, made a reference to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on how to interpret and apply Article 3(1) and (2) of the regulation -- which safeguards a number of rights for end users of Internet access services and prohibits service providers from putting in place agreements or commercial practices limiting the exercise of those rights -- and Article 3(3), which lays down a general obligation of "equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic." The court found that 'zero rating' agreements that combine a 'zero tariff' with measures blocking or slowing down traffic linked to the use of 'non-zero tariff' services and applications are indeed liable to limit the exercise of end users' rights within the meaning of the regulation and on a significant part of the market. It also found that no assessment of the effect of measures blocking or slowing down traffic on the exercise of end users' rights is required by the regulation, while measures applied for commercial (rather than technical) reasons must be regarded as automatically incompatible. The full CJEU judgement is available here.
A Budapest court hearing two actions against Telenor, related to two of its 'zero rating' packages, made a reference to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on how to interpret and apply Article 3(1) and (2) of the regulation -- which safeguards a number of rights for end users of Internet access services and prohibits service providers from putting in place agreements or commercial practices limiting the exercise of those rights -- and Article 3(3), which lays down a general obligation of "equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic." The court found that 'zero rating' agreements that combine a 'zero tariff' with measures blocking or slowing down traffic linked to the use of 'non-zero tariff' services and applications are indeed liable to limit the exercise of end users' rights within the meaning of the regulation and on a significant part of the market. It also found that no assessment of the effect of measures blocking or slowing down traffic on the exercise of end users' rights is required by the regulation, while measures applied for commercial (rather than technical) reasons must be regarded as automatically incompatible. The full CJEU judgement is available here.
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I'm hoping these will manifest with Trump out of office and Idjit Pai thrown the fuck out of the FCC if not in November than in the near future. It's completely unconscionable what they did.
Re:Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:5, Insightful)
It is being delivered the bandwidth you were sold and not empty lies, here have gigabit bandwidth but no right to actually use, sucker, we sell you nothing, pay extra. Opps different protocol, that costs extra too, oops you made a phone call that is not counted, whoops you went to a site where you pay extra for bandwidth, here use our retail site, it's free, whoops except for the 1,000% markup on all items, whoops you only get that bandwidth on days with sun in them, you have to pay extra for each and every day, whoops did we not till you the twelve to twelve rule, that day time one costs extra, whoops and on and on the infinite greed bullshit goes until it is regulated.
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Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:1)
They were using the bandwidth before. It was just being subsidized. Instead of charging someone to watch Netflix and not directv, now someone is being charged to watch both which means ATT should be getting twice the money and should be able to double the quota and keep revenue the same
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:1)
It was not being subsidized, because AT&T fucking owns DIRECTV. the traffic was already on their network it was not internet traffic. Its Intranet traffic. Thats why its now called ATTNow instead of DirecTV!Now. There is nobody subsidizing that cost. Those servers are on ATTs network
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It was not being subsidized, because AT&T fucking owns DIRECTV. the traffic was already on their network it was not internet traffic. Its Intranet traffic. Thats why its now called ATTNow instead of DirecTV!Now. There is nobody subsidizing that cost. Those servers are on ATTs network
That's a different situation. That would be intranet versus internet traffic. That's not all they are zero rating. They are also zero rating 3rd parties and it's highly unlikely that even though they own DirecTV that all that traffic is internal. It's also not true that all 3rd party data is routed over the internet either. It's not uncommon for companies like Netflix to pay for interconnects and caching servers on other networks to improve service for their customers. Even if it was a case of intran
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
True. But this ruling is going to harm zero-rating anything at all. Which means your free 35 att-tv channels are going to count against your data caps. That is generally not cool.
Its sort of like getting free coffee because you work for starbucks and the government telling starbucks they cant do that anymore.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
Btw netflix does not pay for the interconnect. If I want to peer with netflix I have to pay the loop cost, in order to offload my traffic at my CenturyLink peer. Its the ISP that benefits the most from the peer, not netflix. Netflix peers with all the tier-1 providers simply because well they are Tier-1. Thats the root level backbone of everything. Comcast/Spectrum is not Tier-1. They are still a Tier-2 even though they do have some pretty good offerings.
ATT, CenturyLink, Cogent, etc, those are your tier-1
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True. But this ruling is going to harm zero-rating anything at all. Which means your free 35 att-tv channels are going to count against your data caps. That is generally not cool.
But you are making the flawed assumption that the data caps and the rate charged stay the same if zero rating goes away. That makes no sense. If half the traffic is actually costing ATT very little because it is internal and ATT can no longer do zero rating then logically ATT should either double the data cap or cut the rate charged in half. So to the end consumer, the cost should be a wash just now the consumer has the freedom to use whichever service they want.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
Its a free service. Its a cell phone perk. If I access it with my mobile device it does not count toward my caps. If I watch it from off-net then tat carriers limits would apply. Why in the world would I buy a competing service and forgo a free service unless that service sucked horribly. These live TV streaming services are pricing themselves right up there with freaking cable These live TV streaming services are pricing themselves right up there with freaking cable. I am not about to play that game. I wil
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Why in the world would I buy a competing service and forgo a free service unless that service sucked horribly.
This right here is exactly what is wrong with zero rating and bundling. A company can give away a free service at a loss and run better competitors out of business just because their competitors can't compete with free. Companies shouldn't be allowed to subsidize unrelated products in order to corner the market because once they use their existing monopoly to increase that other market they rarely continue to offer it for free. It's not really free anyways. It is bundled into the cost.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:1)
Why do you only give a shit about the non-location, cloud based, streaming services? Companies have been doing this shit to brick-and-mortar services like small ISPs since 2000. Why is software suddenly the passenger pigeon but to hell with those hardware guys? Why the hell do you support legislature that only protect cloud based assholes like Facebook and do nothing for companies that provide physical access?
Every argument you make for NN, I have, as an ISP, suffered and get zero protection for it. I real
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Who said I only cared about one or the other. I think facebook and amazon should both be required to be broken up and made interoperable with other sites.
You're right that the government shouldn't pick and choose who gets help but they do have a job to make sure the playing field stays level. ATT, Verizon, Amazon, Android, and Apple are defacto monopolies in one way or another and need to be regulated so that they don't stifle competition and innovation.
The primary (or possibly only) purpose of a governme
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
and it's highly unlikely that even though they own DirecTV that all that traffic is internal.
You do realize ATT is a tier-1 provider right? There is no higher point of access for AT&T. Of course its directly on their network. What benefit would it serve to house their shit on CenturyLink that would be paying someone else to house your shit and then have to pay to deliver the service to your own network when you have no shortage of space or bandwidth with regards to delivering services to your own customers.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
Here is a really basic old school example.
You have access to my dialup BBS. Anything located directly on my BBS server does not count toward any sort of usage system in place. That means using the BBS mail system is free, looking at jpegs on the server is free, posting for sale items in the bulletin board free. If you need to proxy a connection to download some usenet encoded files, that counts toward your data caps because now I have to use my internet connection for you to get that data.
Under this ruling
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That would be intranet versus internet traffic. But that's not 100% what is happening. Sure, some of it might be intranet but likely not all of it. Likewise, because of Netflix paying for interconnects and caching servers some of Netflix's traffic might be internal too. But that's kindof besides the point. If ATT is allowed to zero rate their services while charging outrageous above market rates for using their competitor's services then they can give their own services a huge unfair advantage.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
Why do you keep mentioning Netflix? That is not even the same product. Netflix is not a live TV service. Netflix is files on a hard drive. LiveTV is broadcast streaming.
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"Why do you keep mentioning Netflix?"
Even so, isn't it still true that 'if ATT is allowed to zero rate their services while charging market rates for using their competitor's services** then they can give their own services a unfair advantage'.
** : HuluTV, YoutubeTV, SlingTV, etc.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:1)
They give it away free to their customers and its on their network. So ATT is not having to pay anything for the traffic leaving their server and going to their customer.
If I own Starbucks and I want to give my employees free coffee as a perk. What right does the government have to say I have to charge for the coffee or provide free dunkin donuts brand coffee to my employees at my own expense?
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"They give it away free to their customers and its on their network. So ATT is not having to pay anything for the traffic..."
It is not free for ATT, they still have to pay for their own network. And it is not really free for the customer, it is part of their monthly fee.
"If I own Starbucks and I want to give my employees free coffee as a perk..."
Not comparable, ATT customers are not employees, the definitions are near opposites.
Overall, ATT is giving their services an unfair advantage over comparable compet
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I will give you another example since you did not like starbucks employees...
Lets take Hotels. You stay at the Holiday Inn and it comes with that free breakfast in the morning. Now you can make the argument that its technically not free, and that its factored in to the cost of the room. While true, its not as if the breakfast went away, that room prices would start to drop. So for the sake of the explanation, lets just go with it being free.
On the breakfast bar there is an assortment of items.
3 canisters of
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It's not a free service, ATT charges the cost to their customers, and it is actually a loss for the ATT customer that doesn't want the so called free service as they are subsidizing the customers that want the service.
Overall, ATT is giving their services an unfair advantage over comparable competitors' services.
As for your hotel example, it fails because the competing breakfast services don't have to offer their services through the hotel.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
Neither does slingTV. I dont have to use my cellular data plan to watch these shows. I can use my home internet.
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Overall ATT *is* giving their service an unfair advantage over competitors' services.
Re: Good old Net Neuterality again (Score:2)
I pay less for ATT than every other carrier and they give me a free 35 channel liveTV service to boot. How is that unfair over Verizon and their shitty-ass still cant talk-and-data at the same time network? Unfair to sling? Unfair to verizon that im not ass-raped the way verizon would have me? Im paying less than I have ever paid. Since when is being fair meant to fuck over the end user?
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It's unfair because ATT owns the pipe and they are giving their live TV an unfair advantage over others' live TV.
And also unfair because ATT is manipulating its customers with a so called free TV service rather than raise their customers' caps in proportion, which would also benefit all ATT users equally including those that don't watch ATT TV. It comes down to bad regulations and the ensuing lack of effective competition and customer abuse.
I'm in Canada and IPS abuse is much lower because we have better re
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the other live TV services shot themselves in the foot when they decided that their services need to start around $35 and increase to $85. Its as if they did not bother to listen to the complaints about cable TV pricing over the last 2 decades. Granted my 35 channels does not cover the most lucrative ones, but it covered some of the more common ones like AMC for cable shows you cant get access to via hulu. Like the Walking Dead before it started to suck.
Those streaming services are not sucking because of AT
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A lack of interesting competing services can't be used to justify setting up a crooked playing field, in other words I'm not disagreeing with you about facebook.
Re:This is why you don't want NN (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't hear anyone claiming the NN results in a free network. It means everyone pays for what they use. At the same rates. If the ISP wants to give away the first few hundred gigs as a mart of their base monthly charge, that's OK. It just means that all usage counts toward the same cap.
You can still get lower-res Netflix. And if that keeps you under your cap, there's no extra charge. But that low-res service counts the same as downloading cat videos off YouTube.
Free stuff actually comes at a price. Sometimes its a price that you can't see. But it distorts markets. And the very act of various intermediaries negotiating behind your back means that you are making less efficient decisions in those markets.
If Netflix can give you 'free' stuff by adding on advertising and then kicking a part of that back to your ISP by subsidizing your consumption, you have no signals as to the cost of the ads, your broadband service or the content you are interested in. If you should decide to switch ISPs (to one with no zero rating deal) suddenly, you could be hit with huge bills. Because all the money that was changing hands was done behind your back.
If Netflix wants to subsidize their service by selling ads, they can hand that directly to the consumer. In the form of rebates or two price tiers (ads vs add free). And then you could apply the rebate/savings to your ISP bandwidth bill.
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Netflix is generally on the same network already.
Most popular services have peering arrangements with ISPs.
Re: This is why you don't want NN (Score:2)
Other way around sorta. I can order a pipe directly to the netflix peering network if I thought enough of my traffic benefit from it. But netflix is already peering directly with CenturyLink (formerly level3) and Cogent. So I would only save 1 ASN hop on my border bgp tables. It would come down to utilization and if I needed to offload that traffic to free up room. I still pay for that peer to netflix. In the ATT example I gave, I already would have the service directly on my network at no additional cost.
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Most popular services have peering arrangements with ISPs.
So, startups are at a disadvantage? Whatever happened to the right to innovate? Freedom to use the network, etc?
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For a look at the possible outcome of "zero rating" and all sorts of other partnership agreements and behind the scenes financial shenanigans, take a look at the fight between Apple and Epic [slashdot.org]. I suspect that had Apple not hidden such cost details from end consumers, some of them might have made different platform choices. Some may still switch.
Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the advocates of Net Neutrality and its detractors have a strong tendency to talk past each other, and I think it's largely because of how people frame the issue.
Net Neutrality was not important in dial-up days when the last-mile connection was a public utility and the internet service running on it was a competitive market. If you have 50 options for ISPs, market pressures will generally keep any of them from choosing to do nefarious things. If they did, customers would flock to other providers.
When people have only one to four options for getting broadband, that's just not true any more. I think there's plenty of room to debate specifics of net neutrality. I'm not sure whether banning zero-rating outright is the best way to regulate the practice. But the basic idea - products and services which are vital to modern life and only provided by a few oligopolies should have some basic regulation to preserve the public interest - is nothing new or specific to the Internet. It's the same kind of antitrust concerns that have been part of how we keep open markets working ever since 1890.
Net Neutrality detractors are not good faith (Score:4, Insightful)
Support for NN is overwhelming. Only a handful of industry shills and the politicians they've bought off oppose it. There's no reasoning with those people because, as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Re: Net Neutrality detractors are not good faith (Score:1)
The devil is in the details. To say your are for NN as a carte blanche statement without knowing what the costs are is pointless. Its like saying you are all about lower prices. Everybody is for lower prices. I dont know anyone that says || hell no I dont like no lower prices ||
But if lower prices come at the cost of slave labor, now suddenly people have a different opinion about THAT PARTICULAR lower price arrangement.
Stop trying to make the argument so black and white. This recent ruling is not helping th
Re:Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in NZ, the last mile for fibre is owned by a company that cannot provide services to end users - it must sell connectivity to anyone who wants to use it. This means I can get a huge variance of services from a wide range of ISPs at all sorts of price points - for example, my current gigabit service costs me $100 NZD a month (static IP, unlimited and no traffic management), but there are companies out there that sell gigabit for less (with dynamic IP, caps etc) or more, or sell a 200Mbit service etc etc etc.
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That's the way it should be done. That's the way it was done in dial-up days (at least in the US). But that went out when cable came in with lots of political deals.
Re: Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:2)
Dialup died because we simply could not squeeze more than 64k over a call. It goes back to how we frame the T-1s and DS3s. Each DS0 is a 64k time slice. Except in europe where the E1 is 56k channels (more channels but they robbed a few bits from each channel to get partway there). Which is why you never saw more than a 56k modem even though they could have had a 64k one for north america and japan (a J1 is identical to a T1)
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While true, that doesn't talk about the control over access. Cable companies made deals with cities for exclusive access. Then there were mergers and buy-outs, and local monopolies turned into regional monopolies. Fiber adopted the game plan being used by the cable monopolies.
It's true that fiber and cable are natural monopolies, but it's not true that ISPs are necessarily the same companies as the supplier of fast access. ISPs aren't natural monopolies, they're ones engineered by political deals.
Re: Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:3)
Not exactly. Ive been in the industry since the days of dial-up. Natural monopolies occurred because of the last-mile problems.
Going back 75years cities were overrun with telephone poles and wiring. It was an unsightly mess. So things like public services commissions (PSC) csme about because 1) we could not have 10 phone companies stringing cables into a big ball of yarn
2) to protect the consumer now that we declared single monopolies got to own a cities access. The same issue occurs with power. It would be
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I think I'm looking from a slightly earlier point in time than you are, because when I'm talking about the weren't ANY companies with widely spread out coax networks. To put those in was where the political deals started. The companies that put in the coax shouldn't have been allowed to be the same companies that controlled what content was seen over the coax. The problem was the phone companies didn't want anything to do with that alternative network, and the only people willing to pay for it were the c
Re: Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:2)
But there is no last mile for wireless carriers and they get sucked into these rulings too. That fiber cross-connect you are referring to was something I have been advocating for here strongly since 2003. If fact I have been so vocal about it, I wonder if someone in NZ had read one of my detailed examples of how it should work and then ran with the idea. In any event, Im glad the physical last mile is agnostic. What I have not been able to devise is a way for that to work with the wireless phone carriers. Y
Re:Zero-rating is working against broader access (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Banning zero rating is absolutely essential for net neutrality to exist. If zero rating is allowed, then net neutrality cannot exist period.
Zero rating is just a shady back door to avoid net neutrality rules by artificially lowering the data cap, and then allowing "free" access to the sites that bribed you to allow it. It is exactly the same thing as charging extra for sites that didn't bribe you. Either way you skew which sites your subscribers have access to, and either way you force companies to pay you for access to your subscribers.
What's the difference between having not enough data allowance to watch movies, except for those from companies that paid your isp extra to be "zero rated" vs having the data allowance, but the sites that didn't pay your isp extra get throttled to unwatchable? It's exactly the same issue.
As long as ISPs get to play favourites and choose for you which sites you have access to, it doesn't matter which method they use, or what they call it, it's anticompetitive either way.
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If you have zero rating to manage your account at the ISP and pay the ISP for your connection it's fine, but anything outside that shouldn't fly.
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I would say that's an acceptable exemption, just like my cellular provider allows me to call their customer service line without using up my allotted minutes.
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Well, obviously. Zero rating is non-neutral.
Does net neutrality need to exist though? In the US where there's limited competition the answer is definitely "yes". The local monopolies have very shady tactics. In countries where there's healthy competition it's less important. Who would choose an ISP that doesn't allow access to all sites?
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The problem becomes that the shady ISP that's taking money from both ends can undercut the competition in price, because the big players are paying for access to their customers as well as their customers paying for internet access, whereas a reputable ISP only has revenue from it's customers and not from the entrenched players.
Many people will pay that ISP even though they can't access all sites effectively, because they don't think they need access to sites they never heard of. At the same time, this make
It is not artificial. (Score:2)
There is a difference between a service provider getting to musle the bandwidth to competitors to which they provide competing services (i.e.: US ISP degrading the quality of Netflix because it competes with their cable TV service), and a service provider having no uplink internet cost, because the 3rd party service is hosted directly in their data center (e.g.: local netflix cache servers, local whatsapp relay node) and the service provider passing that "absence of bandwidth costs" to the end user's bill.
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Not really. You're giving the ISP an excuse to deliberately under buy capacity to force people to use a service that that ISP sponsors. This raises all the same issues. In both cases you're giving the big service that can afford to pay the ISP an advantage over all new entrants, and making it so that the ISP can deliberately undercut any competition on price to drive out a less shady ISP that correctly bought the right amount of capacity to serve it's users.
What incentive does the ISP have to correctly size
Re:Zero-rating is working against broader access (Score:5, Insightful)
Zero-rating helps customers be able to use sites they otherwise could not afford, because essentially a lower bitrate version of that site access is included with service - like 720P Netflix is free on T-Mobile. If you ban zero-rating, you are talking access AWAY from people who cannot pay. People often claim to want equality, but all too often act in ways that stifles it.
Those are the tricky parts to the argument, and something a lot of lay people get wrong. Companies have spent a lot of money on disinformation campaigns and carefully worded counterarguments.
Thankfully, it's an area the CJEU seems to have understood.
Having a network that is content neutral --- net neutrality --- means that it cannot discriminate based on the content. Neutrality means the content does not matter, all of it is the same. It doesn't matter what the content is or where it is from, if there is metering then all content is metered under the same rules. If those rules would meter web sites like Google, Slashdot, CNN, Hulu, or YouTube, it must also meter sites like AT&T, Fox, Netflix, or Disney+. It cannot matter if that content is video streamed at 1080P or 320x200, ALL content, applications, and services are legally required to be treated identically.
Zero-rating is a form of discriminatory metering. While many people are more concerned about fast lanes vs slow lanes, the two tiers means one group gets preferred service. In your example, Netflix in your example gets a premium deal while other providers are excluded with a higher cost for identical services. These metering schemes are not equal, metering from certain websites (specifically in this lawsuit Facebook's apps, Twitter, and Instagram) are metered on one set of rules, and other competing sites providing the same services are metered on a different set of rules.
The CJEU is correct here. The law requires net neutrality, it does not matter what the content is, nor how "friendly" it is, nor how big the companies are behind it. If the ISP is giving Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Netflix an advantage such as zero-rating it means they are placing other companies at a disadvantage. Even if the companies are paying for a back-room deal, or negotiating on behalf of their companies, that deal is illegal and does not follow net neutrality rules. The law requires equal and non-discriminatory treatment of content, applications, and services.
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Exactly.
And even if they "allow" everyone to take part, that doesn't mean they allow everyone.
For example, i wanted to join as service provider in the category chat with my priviate XMPP server.
However, T-Mobile said that they will only consider services that cater to the public. (And that answer was only after a year-long mail battle where they were either delaying or trying different excuses why my traffic should not qualify)
That means, anyone wanting to use their own chat server will have to pay up while
Re:Zero-rating is working against broader access (Score:4, Insightful)
Zero-rating is not charity: someone is paying for it. Is it fair to let people who don't stream a lot of music and video pay for people who do? People on a tight budget are probably better off with a cheaper base subscription. Especially when the lack of zero-rating makes it easier to compare subscription offers from different providers.
Providers want to be in the content business, since if they have to compete on just data it's much harder to hang on to juicy margins. Customers have emotional links to content, but data can be compared on cold facts. That's why providers don't like net neutrality.
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Zero rating shall only be to manage your account, nothing else.
By that I mean enough access to see what traffic rate you have and to pay your bill for your account.
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Let's go back to dial-up!
Nationalize the communicaton systems (Score:2, Informative)
When the United States was formed, there was a reason that the roads and postal service were nationalized and controlled by the government. Those things create a "marketplace" where everyone needs to be treated equally, and they should be transparent. Privatized roads would have resulted in what happened with the railroads, where players that could make deals with the railroad owners got preferential treatment. It took federal regulation in the US so onerous that the railroads were effectively nationlize
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The roads were certainly NOT 'nationalized and controlled by the government' when the US was formed. The country's first engineered road (the Philadelphia/Lancaster Turnpike), built in 1795, was private, as were virtually all other roads. The first state to even allow the state to be involved in road building was New Jersey, and that happened in the 1890s. The federal government didn't get involved until 1916. Even then, roads such as the Lincoln Highway (NYC to San Francisco) and the Dixie Highway (Can
That's the whole idea behind net neutrality (Score:2)
Zero-rating is a textbook example of a net neutrality violation.
Zero-rating some services is the same as having you pay a premium for using other services, just worded differently.
We could make an exception for charities and public services but Facebook definitely isn't that.