51–60 of 110 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Three, it's the same deal on PAYG as well. £17, my $20 is slightly off
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…
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.
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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices
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?
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.
https://www.internet.org/press/introducing-the-internet-dot-...
I believe some of internet.org's strategies are good. I'd be a lot less skeptical if 'facebook' weren't on that list of 'basic apps'
Regulation is anti-competitive. We don't need regulation, we need competition.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
Isn't that then more of a preference and less of a principled disagreement?
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…
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.