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> What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition. That's not
by will_hughes 9y ago
> What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition.
That's not the only scenario for zero-rating.
Not too long ago, getting international backhaul in Australia was absurdly expensive. So various smaller ISPs joined IXs, and then offered customers plans which had a certain amount of quota for your usual traffic, but traffic which was routed via an IX was zero-rated. This included game servers, FTP mirrors, usenet, and various internet radio services.
This is technically against net neutrality, but I don't see this as being a bad thing for anyone involved.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoWell, what I meant was zero-rating of services, which is what this discussion is about (rather than based on actual operational costs). And actually, arguably, that is not necessarily against net neutrality. Net neutrality ultimately is about whether anyone can send traffic to the ISP's customers under the same, non-monopolistic, conditions. As such, making a geographic distinction isn't really that much of a problem, if it is not used to also implement other distinctions. The question is: Could anyone who would have wanted to send traffic to those customers bought transit on the open market at market rates in order to deliver traffic to within the reach of the zero rating? It's a problem if you can buy special interconnects from the ISP in order to have your traffic zero-rated. It's not really a problem if the ISP says "any traffic delivered to this exchange (that is well-connected to many competing transit providers) is zero-rated".