Top EU Court Plunges Dagger Into Controversial 'Zero Rating' Practice (fortune.com) 33
Europe's top court has struck what could be a mortal blow to the practice of zero rating -- where mobile operators exempt data associated with specific services, such as Spotify or Facebook, from counting towards users' overall data caps. From a report: In a Thursday ruling, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled against the German providers Vodafone and Telekom, saying their "zero tariff" options broke the EU's net-neutrality law -- legislation designed to ensure that operators treat Internet traffic equally, without favoring certain online providers due to commercial considerations. This is not the first time the court has weighed in on the topic, but the ruling is its most definitive repudiation of the practice of zero rating.
As one that have opted out of Facebook (Score:2)
As one that have opted out of Facebook due to my personal opinion I would call that kind of treatment discrimination.
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Well yeah, but the point is that EU just went one step beyond the obvious: they're calling it illegal discrimination.
Are mobile data limits dead yet? (Score:3)
For Cable/Fiber broadband lines it seems to be accepted consensus that data caps are 100% purely profit centers, there is no technical reason to restrict the amount of monthly data on the network. Maybe it was always that way but the excuse years ago was "if those damn torrenters didn't use up all the data we wouldn't need these caps!" even though that was likely always bullshit. In 2021 that seems not at all the case but now with 5G and upgraded infrastructure on cellular networks are there any technical reasons to have data limits at all? Can the towers handle the full traffic amounts with congestion management on the provider side? Genuinely asking.
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You should only pay for throughput and not bandwidth.
Re: Are mobile data limits dead yet? (Score:2)
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That can someone be much cheaper than unlimited plans. Especially if you are home with WI-Fi most of the time.
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It was an excuse to some degree, certainly in the UK, the problem to some degree was that BT's national backbone was reaching it's limits, such that at peak times there just wasn't enough bandwidth to cope with peak throughput for all users, so there was really two options; cap data, or reduce national throughput. The latter was never practical because it meant that you'd have to convince consumers to accept downgrades to their broadband nationally. Caps were more practical because they only affected a mino
cable systems still have technical reasons (plant) (Score:2)
cable systems still have technical reasons (plant).
Not only can we profit from caps but we can also use them to put off plant upgrades as well.
Re:Are mobile data limits dead yet? (Score:4, Informative)
You can thank Ed Whitacre for all the data cap nonsense back in 2005 when he was bitching about how all the big internet companies made a killing at the expense of the ISPs and weren't paying their fair share..
Quote from Stop The Cap Website:
In 2006, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre thought his company was at a disadvantage being stuck with “dumb pipes” while Google, Yahoo! (remember them?) and Vonage couldn’t count their earnings fast enough. While AT&T sold consumers plain DSL service, content was king on Wall Street and Whitacre groused it was unfair for bandwidth hogs to use “the pipes for free.” That one statement was the equivalent of throwing a lit match on a hillside in Malibu Canyon and a predictable firestorm over Net Neutrality ensued.
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Yahoo! (remember them?)
I still use Yahoo! Finance almost every day, and there is a still a link to Mail at the top of the page.
If your account is gone it means you're a Russian zombie now.
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Interestingly you can also see the bundling issue there - there are add-ons for Apple Music, BT Sport, video streaming...
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The EE plan only gives you 600GB a month. That's a lot, but not "unlimited".
Re: Are mobile data limits dead yet? (Score:2)
This is Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
zero rating is the same as charging competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a scenario where they zero rated everyone but Netflix.
But even the way it is right now, zero rating is subsidizing a product and selling it below cost.
The bundling that is going on right now in the USA is almost as bad where the cell phone carriers
are giving free subscriptions to AppleTV, HBOmax, ATT-TV, DisneyPlus, Netflix, etc..
This artificially pushes more customers to a product that they likely wouldn't subscribe to otherwise
and raises the price for all customers whether they use it or not.
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What baloney -
Netflix per subscriber cost - especially for those who don't use the service or use it very little is probably damn near zero..
The carriers are probably also paying Netflix next to nothing to bundle it. Netflix is banking on people enjoying the service and deciding to keep it and keep paying when they change carriers, or after the bundling agreement ends etc. The carriers are just using "and you get netflix" as another sell point.
Its no different than "get a free $wiget when shop this Saturda
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Its no different than "get a free $wiget when shop this Saturday at $department_store" was/is.
I think your mistake is characterizing them as the the $department_store, when they are actually functioning as the $transport_mechanism.
This is more like someone stopping you as you exit your house and saying "you get free gas and reserved lanes if you go to our preferred stores, but you have to pay your own gas and road tolls to go anywhere else." We wouldn't want that in our physical lives, and I'm not sure why we put up with it on our communications infrastructure.
Our wireless spectrum is a finite resou
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This entire discussing is mixing zero-rating and bundling - they are totally different. Bundling is where the customer signs-up for AT&T internet and AT&T gives the customer Netflix for a discount. Zero rating is where the bandwidth doesn't count toward your data cap. Bundling *can* be a problem, depending on who is doing the bundling and for how long and what is bundled. But zero-rating completely messes with competition. New entrants to the market can't access the zero-rated customers without
Re:zero rating is the same as charging competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
But zero-rating completely messes with competition. New entrants to the market can't access the zero-rated customers without risking hitting the bandwidth cap.
Bundling also completely messes with the competition.
I definitely have more than most because I have multiple phones but I currently get HBOmax, ATTTV, appleTV, prime, Starz, and disneyplus for free. Many of the services I rarely if ever even use. How does a new streaming service compete with free?
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Cable TV in the later 90s - early 2000s certainly hit that point. With you get 150 channels 125 of which 90% of viewers will never watch. The solution is let the market indicate that, when the situation gets crazy people will vote with their feet and move to providers who offer a-la-cart options. However Verizon bundling a few low cost services like basic Netflix packages, and Spotify subscriptions isn't anywhere near the top list of predatory practices they use against consumers. For the majority its probably good for them.
The Cable TV situation is actually a different situation. It wasn't that you were paying for 150 but only wanted 25 but rather that many of the ones that you were not paying for were actually paying the cable company and subsidizing the ones you wanted. To unbundle them would have actually cost the consumer more. Hardly any one wants the shopping channel but the shopping channel is willing to pay part of the customer's bill if the cable company includes that channel.
As far as the Verizon bundle, in the s
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Links to rulings (Score:5, Informative)
Can we please agree to post links to the original court documents when posting articles about court cases?
In this case it seems to be three preliminary rulings https://curia.europa.eu/juris/... [europa.eu] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/... [europa.eu] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/... [europa.eu]
As a side note, the rules seems quite clear and I wonder how the phone companies reasoned when they did this and if they haven't shot themselves in the foot because it's at least not obvious to me that a clear precedence would still allow for phone companies to allow access only to their own sites to top up the data cap when you've run out?
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Can we please agree to post links to the original court documents when posting articles about court cases?
Are you kidding? We can't even get editors to stop posting paywalled articles the majority of Slashdot can't read, let alone agree them to go to an actual original source.
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Can we please agree to post links to the original court documents when posting articles about court cases?
Are you kidding? We can't even get editors to stop posting paywalled articles the majority of Slashdot can't read, let alone agree them to go to an actual original source.
Still, here we are so I'm just going to keep on trying.
Took awhile, CRTC killed this some time ago. (Score:2)
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Videotron also tried to zero-rate some (but not all) music streaming services. It's been ruled a net neutrality violation as well.
I'm torn on this (Score:3)
Most mobile phone operators here have plans for X Gigabyte traffic, which include free traffic to most social networks. Or there's e.g. a "video at night" plan whch gives you free netflix traffic in the night, and so forth.
On a macro-scale, long-term, this is obviously horrible, and makes it way more difficult for new services to become popular.
But in the short term, this is very good and important for the end consumer. With regular data-caps, they would never use the traffic-heacy services at the regular data rates.
So how could this be solved?
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That "video at night" plan that you pay for pays for the traffic that you can possibly cause during the specified time window.
The difference would be that they would have to extend the plan to other services at well turning it into some kind of "uncapped data between XX hours and XX hours" plan.
Maybe there is also some wiggle room as long as they don't single out platforms like netflix and instead make it a "stream at night" plan where you get free traffic to
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> which include free traffic to most social networks.
> [] in the short term, this is very good and important for the end consumer.
Ehm, no, it’s the other way around. The network provider decided to make the customer pay through the nose for a resource that is basically free for them.
There is no difference between bytes from - say - Netflix and from competing streaming services. Both are using the same amount of resources when transmitted over the air, which is the only resource that can be consi
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